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He said that sixty years ago, he’d met a stranger there-a stranger who would become his partner, now dead. It was opened to a page with photos of restrooms in Berlin that have since been demolished. It is a world that’s always been forbidden to them, and they’re fascinated to discover it, including the chapter in the exhibition on women’s toilets.īut the most touching reaction came from an older man I met the opening weekend, who cried discreetly with the exhibition’s catalog pressed against his heart. What surprised you most about comments you received from visitors? Because how could they leave the house for many hours without anywhere to pee? It’s not-so-subtle patriarchal politics.Ī 1910 painting called "The Beginnings of Feminism" depicts a time when public restrooms were limited to me When women were historically denied the opportunity to use public bathrooms-because of claims of indecency-they were basically kept at home.
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I only briefly touch upon it in my exhibition, with a section dedicated to the history of public toilets for women. In the discussion it became clear that lesbians have a very different history with public toilets, one that is not so central, but one that is important and worth further exploration. If you sat in a cubicle waiting for some hot woman to walk in, you might be sitting there for years. Plus, Manuala mentioned that you cannot stand at a urinal next to someone in a women’s toilet. They would go there with someone they had met beforehand and knew, not with a total stranger. They said women use toilets for sex for different reasons: to get away from men, to have a safe space, to close the door behind them. However, Schwules* had the brilliant idea to organize a meeting between Agnès Giard, a well-known French journalist and sex researcher, and Manuela Kay, a Berlin-based lesbian activist, journalist and porn director, for a public debate focused on the feminine perspectives of promiscuity in public places. Sex in toilets has always been a guy thing. Most of the exhibition deals with men having sex in public toilets. “These public toilets, whose history is intertwined with the lives and adventures of many gays, trans people, escorts, libertines, are also unlikely bastions of freedom,” Martin writes. (Full disclosure: I’m a Schwules* employee in the curation and exhibition department.) And while many modern queers would rather forget this chapter of their people's sordid past, public restrooms are undeniably places where community and connection were kindled among us against unlikely odds. “Mischief in public toilets left more traces in vice squad logbooks than in high literature,” photographer Marc Martin writes in the introduction to his new exhibition at Berlin’s Schwules* Museum, Fenster Zum Klo : Public Toilets, Private Affairs.
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Of the places queer people have transformed into sites to cruise for sex-from parks like the Central Park Ramble and Berlin’s Tiergarten, to sanctums like Provincetown’s Dick Dock and Fire Island’s Meat Rack-few have impacted the queer psyche like the public restroom.