Beyond the Breastplate of Righteousness: US Gay Activism Confronts Sex in Public Restrooms, 1950–90

Since the emergence of gender-segregated municipal restrooms in the late nineteenth century United States, men have congregated to seek sex with each other near public toilets, one of the most visible sites of what came to be labeled homosexual behavior throughout the twentieth century. Yet the political movements built on shared experiences of male-male sexual desire—homophile, gay liberation, and gay rights, successively—maintained an ambivalent relationship to sex in public bathrooms and the men who participated in it. While activist campaigns and court cases pushing back against toilet policing provided the nascent homophile movement with some of its only political victories before Stonewall, gay liberation activists and their more moderate successors often disavowed bathroom cruisers in their efforts to consolidate the visions of gay identity they believed could form a basis for either revolutionary subjectivity or responsible citizenship—an activist version of the concept of “the breastplate of righteousness” developed by sociologist Laud Humphreys in Tearoom Trade. Surveying gay activist responses to sex in public toilets from 1950 to 1990 across the US with case studies from Los Angeles and Boston, this paper demonstrates how gay moderates used public bathrooms to detach erotic behavior from sexual citizenship, opposed by a minority current of sexual liberationists who attempted to center sex itself in their political visions until derailed by the rise of HIV/AIDS and the conservative backlash of the 1980s. The history of the fraught relationship between the movements claiming to represent male-male sexual desire and the tearoom cruisers they often sought to disavow challenges conventional historiographical notions of respectability, radicalism, and the relationship between sexual activity and identity in twentieth-century gay politics.