TMQH: The Bathroom Battleground

The US has been in conflict over public restrooms since their inception 1829, from segregation to cruising to anti-trans bathroom bills. In this episode, we dive into why public bathrooms are particularly fraught with moral panics.

Sources/Further Reading
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sDSAfLPDXLuRzNgIcuAvdMshrb7Sw3i-tsoPmEhFga4/edit?usp=sharing

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Transcript

On October 7th, 1964, the Chief of Staff for President Lyndon B. Johnson, Walter Jenkins, was arrested for having sex with another man in a YMCA bathroom, a scandal which made a huge splash in the news but proved inconsequential to that year’s election. This arrest is just one example of the longstanding fervor around public restrooms. From segregation, to cruising, to anti-transgender legislation, public bathrooms have been a focal point of civil rights clashes for decades.

Public bathrooms hold a unique place in the history of moral panics, being a public place in which people do a private act. This juxtaposition creates a potent sense of vulnerability in public bathrooms, a vulnerability that has led to myriad laws dictating who can use which bathrooms and for what. These laws usually claim to be protecting public decency, with “decency” being defined as anything offensive to those writing the laws. 

The first recorded public restroom in the US was in the Tremont House in Massachusetts, built in 1829. Massachusetts was also the first state to legally require bathrooms to be gender segregated in 1887. Prior to that point, the social order limited women to the home, or if they were working class, their place of work. Suffragettes fought to have women’s bathrooms included wherever there were men’s bathrooms, allowing women to leave the private sphere comfortably. However, while the suffragette movement was pushing for gender segregated bathrooms, the burgeoning civil rights movement was pushing for the opposite for race. Jim Crow laws passed in the wake of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period segregated public spaces, including bathrooms, into white and Black bathrooms. These bathrooms were ostensibly built under the principle of “separate but equal,” but the bathrooms were anything but. Segregated bathrooms, and the laws that created them, gave white people legal justification for the harassment and assault of anyone they deemed to be using the “wrong” bathroom. 

We are now seeing the same harassment play out in gender segregated bathrooms, with cisgender and non-intersex people emboldened by regressive transphobic and intersexist laws policing who qualifies as male or female. This isn’t the first time queer people have been targeted by bathroom policies, however. 

The crusade against cruising began in earnest in the 1950s. Cruising refers to queer people, usually gay men, hanging around in public spaces looking for partners. Cruising frequently occurred along the streets of large cities, in working class areas like docks, and, yes, in public bathrooms, euphemistically referred to as “tearooms.” Cruising has likely existed as long as people have been living in large social groups, but its proliferation in the United States was a response to the lack of safe spaces for queer people to meet sexual partners. Even where those spaces were available, queer people in heterosexual relationships were afraid of being caught at gay bars and outed. Public sex was widely outlawed, regardless of the gender of the participants, but many large cities began focusing attention on tearoom cruising beginning in the 1950s and 60s. This led to the arrest of Walter Jenkins in 1964, as well as the high-profile arrest of George Michael in 1998. The latter was an example of the underhanded techniques often used by police officers, as George Michael attested after the fact that he’d been entrapped by the plainclothes officer who arrested him. The charge against Michael and many others was for a “lewd act,” a breach of “public decency” laws. Some would get a sodomy charge slapped on top, as well. The prevalence of arrests for cruising dropped in the 2000’s as sodomy laws were overturned in the US, and the Internet proliferated, making it legal and safer for queer people to find each other through bars or websites. 

But, as one moral panic around bathrooms declined, another rose to take its place. The first bathroom bill, as they came to be known, to make national news was passed in March of 2016 by North Carolina’s state legislature. The stated reasoning for the bill, HB 2, was to protect the privacy of women and children, with the implication being that transgender people, and in particular transgender women, were predators. Just the year before, an anti-discrimination law failed to pass in Houston, a failure largely attributed to a smear campaign depicting a man following a young girl into the women’s bathroom. Conservatives believed that trans women were men lying about their gender in order to assault women and girls in the bathroom, despite there being no cases of this ever happening. In fact, transgender people are themselves often the victims of assaults in bathrooms, assaults which have increased in number since the passing of laws like HB 2. Just as Jim Crow laws legitimized the assault of Black people for using the “wrong” bathroom, laws like these legitimize the harassment of transgender people, as well as intersex people and gender-nonconforming people like cisgender butch lesbians. And sadly, although HB 2 was repealed in 2019, the last 5 years have seen dozens of states, counties, and cities pass ordinances dictating that people must use the bathroom which matches the gender on their official documentation, under threat of arrest and imprisonment. Some laws state that they must match their birth certificate, and others say official government documentation such as a driver's license. 

The aim of these laws is the same as all the public spaces that refused to put in women’s bathrooms: driving gender diverse and gender non-conforming people out of the public sphere and back into the shadows. To bigots, the closet is the only acceptable place for queer people to be. They seek social control through fear and coercion, and will use the legal system to enforce their draconian beliefs anywhere they are allowed to gain power. We cannot let them take power. Vote.

Thank you for joining us for the sixth episode of This Month in Queer History. Take care, and join us next month for our seventh episode all about the history of Transgender Day of Remembrance.