Tales of cottaging and cruising have regularly featured in (and been sensationalised by) the tabloid media, but what really is cottaging? And are people still doing it today?
In 1998, George Michael released a tongue-in-cheek, brilliantly camp video for ‘Outside’. “Yes, I’ve been bad,” he sings, thrusting his hips while dressed as a gay police officer surrounded by similarly-uniformed porn stars (phallic baton, of course, included). Not only is it a work of audiovisual genius, it’s also a piece of brilliant political satire.
Earlier that year, Michael was arrested, outed and publicly shamed after being caught cottaging by a policeman in a Los Angeles toilet. Salacious headlines ensued, marking the first time many readers had heard of the common gay cruising practice, which has hardly been heard of since.
What is cottaging?
Cottaging is a specific form of gay cruising which exclusively takes place in public toilets. Sometimes, glory holes are drilled into cubicle walls, but not always. It’s a practice with a rich American history as well, where these lusty loos are referred to as ‘tearooms’ – interestingly, though, the name is often thought to be a reference to ‘tea’ as British slang for ‘urine’.
Queer histories are frequently sanitised or erased, so it’s hard to pin down. It’s thought that male-only bathhouses and toilets were used for sex in Victorian times, but one of the first extensive, British accounts came in 1937 book For Your Convenience.
Veiled by a pseudonym, the author basically writes a Time Out guide to cottaging hotspots, detailing the specifics of their clientele. ‘Rough trade’ (‘trade’ remains popular gay slang for a casual sex partner) could be found in London's Covent Garden, whereas ‘a good class’ was more likely to frequent Waterloo station.
Who does cottaging?
Unlike glory holes, which aren’t always in male toilets and are therefore sometimes used by trans women, cottaging is pretty much a male-only practice.
As with cruising more generally, many assumed it died after the advent of hook-up apps like Grindr, but this has proven to be untrue – a 2017 Buzzfeed investigation found a handful of men who still cottage regularly, some of whom said they’d been doing so since childhood. Back in a more hostile, pre-internet age, American sociologist Laud Humphreys embarked on a controversial mission to detail these men. The result was Tearoom Trade, a landmark study which offered some insight.
The main takeaway was that there was no archetype: some were described as straight, middle-class businessmen, others as uniform-clad petrol station attendants. “They have come here for ‘instant sex,’” writes Humphreys, clarifying that “many men” seek “such impersonal sex, shunning involvement, desiring kicks without commitment.”
Is cottaging illegal?
Yes, cottaging is illegal. Even revisions to the Sexual Offences Act 2003 took care in upholding the specific criminalisation of sex in public toilets, arguably singling out cottaging in the process.
Cottaging being illegal is a political issue. Police officers have a long history of trying to frame horny cruisers, an issue explored by independent game creator Robert Yang in 2017 release The Tearoom. Players get to experience the thrill and the danger of soliciting in toilets by locking eyes with random men at urinals – and praying they aren’t policemen. If successful, you get to go down on the stranger – but there’s a surprise (no spoilers) concealed in his pants.
Yang made the game to raise awareness of the over-criminalisation of cruising. “The time specifically burned into my brain is Mansfield, Ohio in the summer of 1962, when cops secretly surveilled a public bathroom,” he tells Cosmopolitan UK.
“They brought in a big tripod-mounted film camera, staffed it with a human cameraman, and hid everything in a custom-built closet behind a one-way mirror, across several months. It’s a classic case study in cops doing creepy and intrusive things to ruin the lives of consenting adults. Is it surprising? To many LGBTQ+ people, unfortunately not – it’s just another abuse of power and public resources.”
So, how do men solicit while cottaging?
Gay culture is known for its secret codes – like the handkerchief code, which colour-coded your preferred fetishes for horny, queer strangers, or Polari, a makeshift language resistant to policing. Cottaging has its own version: ‘tapping’. In cubicles, one man usually initates contact by tapping his foot under the divider. If he gets a similar gesture in response, he’ll edge his foot closer. After a few repeats of this pattern, a hand is slid underneath to seal the deal.
This illicit code made worldwide headlines in 2007, when U.S. Senator Larry Craig was caught ‘tapping’ by a policeman. Eight men soon emerged to detail their alleged sexual encounters, adding fuel to the fire which ended his career and saw him fined more than $200,000.
Why is cottaging still culturally relevant?
Not only does cottaging still take place today, its history of ruthless criminalisation feels deeply personal for many gay men, often crudely stereotyped by dogwhistle homophobes as promiscuous and sleazy. The truth is that the covert nature of queer sexual histories was an inevitable consequence of criminalisation and stigma, but there’s a more obvious fact, too: anonymous sex can be hot as fuck when it’s between two consenting adults.
Still, the demonisation of cottaging has left its mark. Yang highlights that, years after publishing Tearoom Trade, Laud Humphreys “came out as a gay man who was also dealing with his own pain and sexual anxiety – learning about all that made his research feel very personal to me.”
He isn’t alone in feeling this way. Like cruising more generally, the continued criminalisation of cottaging illuminates differing societal views on heterosexual public sex (basically fine) and gay public sex (kind of fine, unless you’re caught by a homophobe or happen to be fucking in a toilet). From high-profile scandals to secret codes, there’s a whole load of salaciousness surrounding cottaging – but dig deeper, and you’ll find an enduring political commentary.
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