The Tearoom: the gay cruising game challenging industry norms

In Mansfield, Ohio, 1962, police set up hidden cameras in a public bathroom to record consensual sexual activity between men. An artist named William E Jones, who was born in Ohio that same year, later found the footage online, edited out a voiceover that he described as "as illiterate and hateful a text as I have ever heard committed to film", and released the result in 2007 as a "found footage" documentary called Tearoom (US slang for a public bathroom in which men meet to have anonymous sex). The footage reveals the men involved were diverse in appearance – and presumably background – but all were wary. And with good reason: many of them were later arrested. Public bathrooms have long been a battlefield where LGBT people are targeted by the law.