Cottaging

This article is about the sexual behavior. For other uses, see Cottage (disambiguation).

The appearance of public lavatories, like this one in Pond Square, Camden, London, is the origin of the term cottaging.

Cottaging is a UK gay slang term referring to anonymous sex between men in a public lavatory (a "cottage", "tea-room" or "beat"), or cruising for sexual partners with the intention of having sex elsewhere. The term has its roots in self-contained English toilet blocks resembling small cottages in their appearance; in the English cant language of Polari this became a double entendre by gay men referring to sexual encounters.

"Cottage" is documented as having been in use during the Victorian era to refer to a public toilet and by the 1960s had become an exclusively homosexual slang term. The word used in this sense is predominantly British (a cottage more commonly being a small, cosy, countryside home), though the term is occasionally used with the same meaning in other parts of the world. Among gay men in America, lavatories used for this purpose are called tea rooms.

Locations

Cottages were and are located in places heavily used by many people such as bus stations, railway stations, airports and university campuses. Often glory holes are drilled in the walls between cubicles in popular cottages. Foot signals are used to signify that one wishes to connect with the person in the next cubicle. In some heavily used cottages, an etiquette develops and one person may function as a lookout to warn if non-cottagers are coming.

Since the 1980s, more individuals in authority have become more aware of the existence of cottages in places under their jurisdiction and have reduced the height of or even removed doors from the cubicles of popular cottages, or extended the walls between the cubicles to the floor to prevent foot signalling.

Cottages as meeting places

Sign for cottaging at the Praça do Comércio, Lisbon, Portugal

Before the gay liberation movement, cottages were amongst the few places where men too young to get into gay bars could meet others who they knew for sure to be gay.

Many, if not most, gay and bisexual men at the time were closeted, and there were almost no public gay social groups for those under legal drinking age.

The Internet is transforming cottaging from an activity engaged in by men with other men, often in silence, and who do not communicate beyond the markings of a cubicle wall. Today an online community is being established in which men exchange details of locations, discussing aspects such as when it receives the highest traffic, when it is safest and to facilitate sexual encounters by arranging meeting times. The term cybercottage is used by some gay and bisexual men who use the role-play and nostalgia of cottaging in a virtual space or as a notice board to arrange real life anonymous sexual encounters.

Legal status

Sexual acts in public lavatories are outlawed by many jurisdictions. It is likely that the element of risk involved in cottaging makes it an attractive activity to some.

Historically in the United Kingdom, public gay sex often resulted in a charge and conviction of gross indecency, an offence only pertaining to acts committed by males and particularly applied to homosexual activity. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 permitted homosexual sex between consenting adults over 21 years of age when conducted in private. The act specifically excluded public lavatories from being "private". The Sexual Offences Act 2003 eventually removed this contentious offence in favour of "indecent exposure".

In many of the cases where people are brought to court for cottaging, the issue of entrapment arises. Since the offences are public but often carried out behind closed doors, the police have found it easier to use undercover police officers who would frequent toilets posing as homosexuals in an effort to entice other men to approach them for sex. These men would then be arrested for indecent assault. Such practices were severely curtailed after a judge decided the police officer in the case had consented to the assault if he had desired and required the defendant to touch him with sexual intent in order to have evidence of a crime. Alternatively, they were arrested for importuning, with a much lower burden of proof, shorter maximum sentence.

Timeline of historic cases

Date	Event
1943	Newspaper editor Clarence McNulty was arrested for wilfully and obscenely exposing his person in the Lang Park toilets near Wynyard railway station in Sydney, Australia. He denied the charges and this early case highlighted the practice of the police using pretty policemen (i.e. as "bait") to entrap the public. As only one police officer was present in the toilet, the magistrate determined that the police were unable to correctly corroborate the evidence and gave McNulty the benefit of the doubt.
1946	Sir George Robert Mowbray, 5th Baronet Mowbray, was fined for importuning men at Piccadilly Circus Underground station.
1940s	Tom Driberg charged with indecent assault after two men shared his bed in the 1940s and used his position as a journalist several times to get off later charges when caught soliciting in public toilets by the police.
1953	Actor Sir John Gielgud was arrested and fined £10 for cottaging ("persistently importuning").
1953	MP William J. Field was arrested for persistently importuning in a public toilet. Field appealed against the conviction twice but failed on both occasions.
1954	American mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. arrested in a public toilet in Santa Monica, California. He was stripped of his top-secret security clearance and fired from the think tank where he was a consultant.
1956	Sir David Milne-Watson was fined for importuning at South Kensington railway station.
1962	On 6 November 1962, actor Wilfrid Brambell was arrested in a toilet in Shepherd's Bush for persistently importuning.
1962	In 1962, the Mansfield Police Department conducted a sting operation in which they covertly filmed men having sex in the public restroom underneath Central Park. Thirty eight men were convicted and jailed for sodomy. After the arrest, the city closed the restrooms and filled them in with dirt. The police later made a training film of the footage. It was rereleased in 2007 as "Tearoom".
1964	In October, President Lyndon B. Johnson's aide Walter Jenkins was arrested in a YMCA in Washington, D.C., and the case was subsequently dismissed.
1968	Michael Turnbull was arrested in Hull for cottaging in a public toilet, before he became Bishop of Durham.
1975	In September 1975, actor Peter Wyngarde was arrested (under his real name, Cyril Louis Goldbert) in Gloucester bus station public toilets for gross indecency with Richard Jack Whalley (a truck driver). He was fined £75.
1976	Sixty-six-year-old retired U.S. Major General Edwin Walker made sexual advances to an undercover police officer in a restroom at a park in Dallas, Texas on June 23, 1976, and was arrested for public lewdness. The general pleaded no contest and was fined $1,000 and court costs.
1976	Former Judge G. Harrold Carswell was convicted of battery for advances he made to an undercover police officer in a Tallahassee men's room.
1981	Coronation Street actor Peter Dudley was observed exposing himself to another man in a public toilet in Didsbury, Manchester, and was charged with importuning. He pleaded guilty and was fined £200. Some months later, Dudley was charged again with gross indecency for an alleged similar offence, though this time he claimed he was not guilty and had been set up by the police. A Crown Court jury failed to reach a verdict, but while waiting for a retrial, Dudley suffered a series of strokes and heart attacks and died in October 1983.
1984	Actor Leonard Sachs was fined for importuning in a public toilet.
1988	Australian radio personality Alan Jones was arrested in a public lavatory block in London's West End and charged with two counts of outraging public decency by behaving in an indecent manner under the Westminster by-laws. He was later cleared of all charges and awarded costs.
1990	British pop star Stedman Pearson (of the group Five Star) appeared at Kingston Magistrates Court in October 1990 and pleaded guilty to a charge of public indecency after being arrested in a public toilet in New Malden in London.
1998	In April 1998, pop star George Michael was arrested for "engaging in a lewd act" in a public toilet in Los Angeles after a sting operation by local police. Although he considered the arrest to be police entrapment, he pleaded "no contest" to the charge in court and was fined $810 and ordered to do 80 hours of community service. Later that year, Michael satirised the events in his music video for the song "Outside" and was sued by one of the officers in the original arrest for portraying him as non-heterosexual and mocking him. The suit was ultimately dismissed.
1998	In October 1998, UK Labour Party MP Ron Davies was mugged at knife point on Clapham Common. He resigned after it became clear he was engaging in homosexual activities in a known cottaging area.
2007	In June 2007, US Senator Larry Craig was arrested in the men's public toilet in the Lindbergh Terminal of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for allegedly soliciting sex. Craig later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and announced his intent to resign from his post as Republican senator from Idaho which he later rescinded. He contested his guilty plea and decided to serve out his term, but did not run for re-election in 2008.

Cultural response

• After the murder of playwright Joe Orton by his boyfriend in 1967, Orton's diaries were published and included explicit accounts of cottaging in London toilets. The diaries were the basis of the 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears and the play of the same name.
• The film Get Real was based on the 1992 play What's Wrong with Angry?, which features schoolboys cottaging as a key theme.
• The modern dance company, DV8, staged a piece in 2003 called Men Who Have Sex With Men (MSM), which explicitly portrayed the theme of cottaging.
• The Chinese film East Palace, West Palace, released in 1996, is centred on cottaging activity in Beijing.
• Nicholas de Jongh's play Plague Over England was based on the arrest and conviction of John Gielgud for cottaging and premièred in 2008.
• The Strange Decline of the English Cottage is a documentary currently being made about why cottaging is no longer a mainstay of the gay community.

See also

• Cruising for sex
• Gay bathhouse
• Dogging
• Grindr