In the Tearoom ... Not Really What I Expected

This weekend I attended a screening as part of a film festival I didn’t previously know existed: the 3rd PornfilmfestivalBerlin (that’s all one word, because, you know, the Germans). Encouraged by my friend Devin, I made my way with some trepidation into the darkened back entrance of the Eiszeit theatre to see William E Jones’s Tearoom (1962/2007), a film that Devin matter-of-factly described as ‘surveillance camera footage of men having gay sex in a public bathroom.’ How could I resist.
But Tearoom makes for much more than a titillating anecdote. The film, recently included in this year’s Whitney Biennial, is disturbing and unsatisfying on multiple levels, even more so than the average porn. The 56-minute film consists only of scratchy, brief clips of found footage of men disappearing behind the bluish gray walls of toilet stalls in an underground public toilet in Mansfield, Ohio, to, presumably, engage in sexual acts. It’s comprised entirely of archival footage taken by the Mansfield Police Department in 1962 as part of a surveillance operation to collect evidence of men having homosexual sex in public in order to convict them of sodomy.
The men caught on film are uniformly dressed in short-sleeve white shirts, skinny ties and hats. Because they were only filmed a few seconds at a time, we rarely see them coming or going, but usually in mid-stream: zipping or unzipping their trousers, disappearing into the stalls, a brief shuffling of feet visible underneath. Only occasionally does the footage become explicit or actually capture two men ‘in action’. Usually we only see one side of the exchange. Particularly stuck in my memory is a gray haired balding man who pulls his trousers halfway down and then enters the stall backwards, wiggling a bit in order to find the right position, then backing up further, a look of concentration on his face that suggests he’s trying to insert a suppository, and he might as well be – as we never see who or what is behind him.
The men are of all ages, sizes and even races. Some of them wear sunglasses and several have cigarettes dangling from their mouths while they determinedly prepare themselves for intercourse. The film has no soundtrack, so the theatre remained uncomfortably quiet throughout. For the first ten minutes or so, I could hear the soundtrack of another film leaking from the theatre next door – so the deadpan footage was accompanied by the sounds of an incredibly dramatic and prolonged female orgasm. A few minutes later, the greasy-faced teenager sitting next to me, who was attending the sitting alone and had placed himself in the back row, pulled a jumbo-sized cardboard carton of juice from his backpack and proceeded to take long swigs from it, so that I could hear every detail of his lips sucking on the nozzle of the carton, and then the juice traveling through his digestive track. The audience seemed remarkably patient, though, even after it became clear after the first few minutes that there would be no money shots, not even so much as a glimpse at any specific mechanics of gay sex. In terms of the requirements of conventional porn, the film is about as sexually exciting as Catherine Millet’s excruciatingly detailed and mechanical descriptions of her sexual escapades in her 2002 ‘autobiography’ The Sexual Life of Catherine M. This is as unsexy and matter-of-fact as porn can be.
The footage in Tearoom, as the filmmaker revealed in a question-and-answer session after the screening, is the complete existing record of a sting operation in which the police installed a two-way mirror in the toilet and a small compartment behind it to hide the camera. But this was no robotic camera – as the first few seconds of the film reveal (which document the construction of the false wall) a member of the police department was operating the camera at all times, standing behind the fake mirror and deciding what to film and how, and for how long. He was, essentially, making a gay porn. Except that the footage was instrumental in putting more than 30 of the 70 men filmed in prison for up to one year each. Others were likely ‘institutionalized’. Jones’s conceptual project was to show the record of the surveillance in chronological order in its entirety – his only editorial decision was to reveal the details of the police’s sting set-up in the first few moments of the film, rather than at the end.
Though some audience members questioned whether this might be a violation of the privacy of those on the film, Jones maintained that it was more important to show the violations of privacy performed by the police themselves. He sees the toilet (which was later demolished) as a kind of underground utopia of 1960s Middle America: here was a place where gay men, black and white, could freely have contact – something which would have been impossible in any other place in Mansfield – a town which, 45 years later, still doesn’t have a single gay bar.