rmd | 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.