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Sunday, Sep 07, 2008
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Tour De Life by Beau Burriola |
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| 'Foot Tapping' | ||
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by Beau Burriola -
SGN Foreign Correspondent In 2002, when I was on the second floor of Johnson Hall at the UW, I had to quickly duck into a cavernous restroom. It hadn't occurred to me at the time that I was about to learn a little about covert Gay life, but it only took two minutes to find out that there was something more to this place than a restroom. While reading the usual graffiti adorning the stall walls (which has always been to me a fascinating glimpse at the sleazier side of people's lives, like reading trashy grocery store gossip magazines) I heard a definitely-out-of-place sound echoing from somewhere along the other side of the room, a sort of shuffling. I heard a door open and close, and then not too long after, I saw a foot from the stall next to me slide into my stall and start tapping. At first I wasn't at all sure what was going on. I'd never heard of people hooking up in public restrooms. I tried to figure out some reason why someone might accidently slide their foot into another stall. Maybe he might be trying to recover twenty bucks he dropped or maybe he fell asleep and was falling off his perch, twitching. When the foot didn't go away, my thickness gave in and I figured it out. At the time, I thought it very strange that people still hooked up in restrooms. I thought it seemed a bit too 70s-Gay-fiction to be real, harking from an era where discretion was necessary for survival. With all the modern ways men have to hook up with the internet, I thought restroom foot-tapping appeared to be a litte beyond its day. The realization that public restroom sex was alive and well was surprising, sure, but more than that, it made me a little sad for all those people who embraced public sex - not out a sense of liberation - but as an act of incarceration, living real lives in the closet that they only ventured out of in public restrooms or parks with total strangers. This was not the liberated Gay world I imagined I was coming into, but I realized that it is the only Gay life some people know. Over the years, as I discovered more about the various Gay worlds out there, I became less and less shocked by the ways men look for sex. Being an openly Gay man assures that you'll one day come across something (if not a whole laundry list of things) you don't feel you relate to at all, but the shock of that first discovery in Johnson Hall all came back to me this week when every news outlet on earth reported the Gay restroom sex sting saga of Idaho Senator Larry Craig. Besides the usual hurrah-feeling-of-vindication at another hypocritical nutjob finally getting his due, I feel genuine pity for the senator for the cage he lives in, where the pressure to pretend to be straight gets to be so much that the truth only boils over in exchanges with strangers in airport bathrooms . I feel angry at the world we all live in that makes people so afraid, and I wonder if the whole public restroom/park Gay sex culture just makes it easier for people to live these unhappy, closeted double-lives. In the Gay world I like to imagine we will one day live in, sex in restrooms and parks won't be necessary. In this dream world of equality, nobody will feel like they need to be closeted, sex won't be shamed into dark corners, and our community will not be defined so much by people like Larry Craig or James McGreevy or Mark Foley as it is by real, out Gay people who don't come to be faces of the Gay community by scandal and hypocrisy, but rather by pride and respect. Of course, the real world isn't that way. The many shades of Gay, from the closet to the pride parade, mean that there will always be Gay people whose view of their sexuality is limited to a restroom stall; and while I cannot relate to that, I can hope that one day those folks will at least experience what another type of Gay life can be like, too - the one lead by most of us out in the open, with no foot tapping necessary. Beau Burriola is a writer more careful than before not to tap out songs in his head when in an airport restroom. beaubrent@gmail.com |
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visit Beau at www.beaubrent.com
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