Filed under: "It has gotten better"

Back 7 years before Stonewall, there weren't a lot of good/safe options for guys to get their queer sex on. From the description here:

For two weeks in the summer of 1962, using a two-way mirror, police in the central Ohio town of Mansfield secretly filmed the activity in a public men's room in the town square. The surveillance recorded dozens of men having sex, resulting in more than 30 prosecutions for sodomy, with at least a year in prison time for each.

Decades later, acclaimed filmmaker William E. Jones acquired the Mansfield footage while working on another project. The images so fascinated him that he's been screening it, unaltered by further editing, as the 56-minute Tearoom.

The entire footage is available at the above site at the "swallow the pill" link. Also, here's a link to Jones' site about the film.

Apparently, the crackdown happened after a murder suspect (arrested for molesting and killing two young girls) mentioned the bathroom sex activities during his interrogation. There's apparently a film about that case as well, called "Child Molester".

I'm really glad I'm living in a time and place where I can openly live with and love my same-sex partner. And if there are still ways in which we're second class citizens, we're not in a place where we're criminals of love, either.

heady stuff, this reversal.

I'm partway through the book "Time's Arrow", by Martin Amis. Our narrator is living in the head of a guy but is not the guy - he's just along for the ride, some kind of secondary consciousness. Our narrator is living backwards, and parsing everything as happening in reverse. He starts off in the body of an old man and gradually gets younger and healthier. Cabs are always there when you need them even in the rain and they always know where to take you - no wonder why we spend so long saluting and waving at them to thank them for their service. Pimps are angelic creatures who give money to women and heal their bruises. All those hippies and freaks who go to Vietnam for the war end up coming back all clean-cut and sane.

It's a heady book - I (somewhat obviously) have to read some conversations in reverse to make sense of them. I keep being surprised in the ways things are happening. (Why do patients in doctor's offices sit around in the waiting room after the appointment? Our narrator isn't quite sure about that, but that's the way things are.)

I know roughly where the book is taking me[1], but it's still a hell of a ride.

ETA: finished it. yeah. that's ... uh... that's a book, right there.

[1]Ur tbrf gb Nhfpujvgm naq perngrf n enpr sebz gur fbhyf sybngvat va gur avtug nve arne gur puvzarlf. Gehyl n uvture pnyyvat. (link to decrypt rot-13)