Canthegloryholespeak
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**Work in Progress** Prepared for the 2016 Western Political Science Association Conference. Please do not cite or circulate without permission. Comments or suggestions are very welcome. Can The Glory Hole Speak?: Public Sex and the Right Not To Have Rights Kevin Henderson University of Massachusetts Amherst [email protected] Henderson “In dealing with an open-secret structure, it’s only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick In May 2015, The New York Times ran a story entitled “Chelsea’s Risqué Businesses.”1 The story reports on how parents—many gay and lesbian—on New York’s west side are calling for the closing of Manhattan’s few remaining gay sex stores on 8th Avenue between Eighteenth and Twenty-third Streets that allow for costumers to have sex in the stores’ backroom video booths. The shops are especially well known for their glory holes. Parents, some of whom frequented these same shops before having children, complain that the sex stores represent a public nuisance and an affront to their and their children’s quality of life. The summer of 2015 also saw several well-coordinated police stings in gay cruising areas as well as police raids by the Department of Homeland Security on the New York City headquarters of the popular gay escort website Rentboy.com2—which might all come as a surprise to those who witnessed mass celebrations around the so-called “progress” of gay and lesbian rights by key arms of the state (complete with a rainbow-lit White House) prompted by the Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage that same summer. The systematic policing of queer public sex, contributing to an overall strategy of mass incarceration and the lengthening of sex offender registry lists, seemed to sit comfortably with the banal festivity of gay and lesbian identity and occasional evocations of Stonewall by politicians and mainstream gay and lesbian organizations. 1 Michael Winerip, “Chelsea’s Risqué Businesses,” The New York Times, May 15, 2015. 2 Stephanie Clifford, “7 Charged With Promoting Prostitution by Working on Rentboy.com, an Escort Website,” The New York Times, August 25, 2015. 2 Henderson Taking cues from Gayatri Spivak's landmark essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), this paper seeks to grasp, by perhaps a necessarily circuitous route, why it is so difficult to understand the persistent policing of gay public sex in the post-Obergefell era and to understand the pernicious effects of such policing. In doing so, the essay asks: can the glory hole speak? And, if the glory hole cannot speak, does it have the right to exist? Does one have a right to public sex? Or, does claiming such a right have the perverse effect of “preserving the subject of the West, or the West as subject,”3 such that it invites more policing? Further, this essay is an effort to think about the role of public sex in sustaining queer worlds and to put public sex back on the table for thinking about sexual politics. In this essay, I bring together Samuel Delaney, Gayatri Spivak, Michel Foucault, and Hannah Arendt in a polemical fashion to discuss theories of representation, the subject of rights, and the space of the political. I conclude by proposing a “right not to have rights” as a strategy to oppose the policing that accompanies the representation of the Western, rights-bearing, speaking subject and its (queer) others. I. By public sex, I mean erotic encounters that occur in parks, truck stops, bathhouses, bookstores, public restrooms, alleyways, gyms and saunas, beaches, pornographic theaters, and other sites outside the home, usually between strangers. Meetings in these sites are largely unplanned and random but take place through highly socialized rituals of cruising that involve body language and other social cues. The 3 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 1988), 271. 3 Henderson history of the policing of public sex is also the history of the policing of sex work, as sex workers sometimes use public sex institutions to do business and because various laws and health codes have been used to crack down on both public sex and sex work as common objects of policing. Public sex between men has been a subject of policing and controversy for long time, although the policing logics and surrounding discourses have shifted throughout the century. From the 1880s to the 1920s, medical, legal, military and newspaper reports document that a number of public locations including public parks, subway toilettes, and YMCAs had become popular meeting places for public sex between “fairies,” “queers,” and “perverts,” in Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco that became subject to policing.4 The New York Police Department, at the urging of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (SSV), raided several bathhouses known for tolerating sexual encounters between men including three well- documented raids on the Lafayette Baths and the Everard Baths between 1916 and 1919.5 John Sumner, the leader of the SSV, also led raids between 1920 and 1921 on “movie theaters, subway washrooms, and restaurants” where homosexual men congregated.6 New York Police raided the Lafayette Baths again in 1929 in a citywide crack down.7 During World War II, several “openly gay” bathhouses opened across the country, primarily in port cities that stationed soldiers and sailors before going off to war. 4 This history is primarily drawn from Allan Bérubé’s excellent 1984 historical study of gay bathhouses. Allan Bérubé, “The History of Gay Bathhouses,” in Policing Public Sex (Boston: Southend Press, 1996), 189. 5 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 146. 6 Ibid., 146. 7 Bérubé, 194. 4 Henderson Policing lulled during this period, even as public sex between men exploded in port cities, likely because the participants were military service members. However, after World War II and with the rise of McCarthyism, police resumed raiding and closing down the gay bars and baths throughout the 1950s and 60s—targeting nearly any space where gay and lesbian people met, not just places for sexual encounters. Public sex between men became a topic of national discussion in the United States and Canada after the publication of Laud Humphreys’s 1970 sociological study Tearoom Trade: Impersonal sex in public places that analyzed sex between men in public toilettes. The study later prompted the creation of institutional review boards within universities due to the study’s unethical violation of privacy for research participants, but also ramped up policing, even as the book called for toleration of public sex as a “victimless crime.” Although raids on gay bars slightly decreased in the post-Stonewall era, there was a steady increase in vice raids on gay bathhouses, parks, and restrooms in the 1970s as criminal codes were rewritten to explicitly target sex acts done in public rather than target homosexuals explicitly. Across Canada in the 1970s, there were several large police raids on bathhouses, most notably the 1975 raid on Montreal’s Sauna Aquarius, the 1978 raids on the Barracks in Toronto, and the February 5, 1981, raid on four Toronto bathhouses under the name Operation Soap. Operation Soap used 160 cops to arrest 286 men (the largest number of arrests in Canada in a single operation until the 2006 Stanley Cup Playoffs in Alberta) using Canada’s "common bawdy house" laws. The arrests sparked mass demonstrations, roadblocks, and riots across Toronto involving over 3000 people—although smaller raids 5 Henderson would continue even after the protests.8 According to Gary Kinsman, because mass mobilizations and the gay press were successful in pressuring the police to end the use of bawdy-house charges in large-scale raids on bathhouses, police in Canada then turned to policing washrooms and parks that could target individuals in more isolated places: “In 1982-1983 more than 600 men were arrested in Toronto for ‘homosexual’ offenses; more than 600 ‘indecent act’ arrests took place in Toronto in 1985 [alone].”9 Public sex again became a topic of large public dispute during the mid-1980s because of the HIV/AIDS crisis. In the name of public health and safety, local boards of public health around the United States and Canada began closing bathhouses, pornographic movie theaters, and bookstores. Police increased surveillance and arrests in areas known for gay public sex fueled by the fear of HIV/AIDS. Gay assimilationists similarly called for the closure of public sex sites and the increased policing of nonmonogamous sex. Activists, often termed gay moralists, sometimes worked in collaboration with public health boards or state legislatures to condemn public sex institutions. Randy Shilts, for example, opens And The Band Played On, his best-seller journalistic account of the start of the HIV/AIDS crisis, with a discussion of the commercialization of bathhouses and sex clubs, the “discovery” of rimming, and “a thousand men on any one night having sex in New York baths or parks” inherent in gay liberation practices that seemed to culminate as the cause of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, 8 Terence McKenna, “The Toronto Bathhouse Raids,” CBC Radio. February 15, 1989. URL: http://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/the-toronto-bathhouse-raids. 9 Gary Kinsman, “Foreword: The Contested Terrains of ‘Public’ Sex” in Peek: Inside the Private World of Public Sex, by Joseph Couture, xiv. 6 Henderson rather than HIV/AIDS merely being an unpredictable natural disaster.10 In 1985, the legendary St.