Urban amenities; erotic anxieties
Baths, lavatories, and the YMCA: The politics of bodies in civic space
Bebout, Rick
http://www.rbebout.com/queen/2pconv.htm
Date Written: 2002-02-01
Publisher: Rick Bebout
Year Published: 2002
Resource Type: Article
Cx Number: CX24185
A history of public baths, in particular public baths and similar spaces in Toronto in the last century, and the changing perceptions and uses of such spaces by the public, in particular the treatment of private acts within public spaces.
Abstract:
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Excerpts:
The body and its natural functions make modern culture nervous. In the West especially (if not exclusively) our physical ablutions and intimate pleasures have been rigorously domesticated: you are supposed to meet them "in the comfort and privacy of your own home." If you've got one.
The needs and desires of bodies in public are discomfiting, embarrassing, rarely exposed -- except in advertising meant to tap our anxieties, stoke our desires, and promise sanitary satisfaction for a price. Bodies not at home can be bodies in trouble. But in other times and other cultures, even some cultures now, human bodies out in the world could feel very much at home.
...
At the trial of two men seen by police having sex in the lavatory at Allan Gardens, the cops were asked exactly how it was that they had been able to see them at all. People going at it "in public" usually seek the private cover of a closed cubicle, a hidden corner, a car. And the dark.
...
Sex in spaces where men tried to ensure effective privacy became "public sex." And a crime, created by the police. As Steven Maynard has written, sex between men became "a spectacle for police surveillance." A show. In court, cops often called such intimate acts, forced into sudden display, "a performance."
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