Bath House

So here is what I was trying to create or attempt for the performance at Bath House, which is a project coordinated by myself, Ted Kerr, Heather Zwicker and Marshall Watson for Exposure festival, which is Edmonton's Queer Arts and Culture festival.

Todd Janes
Tea Room
Project Description

The bathhouse is a mysterious site for many as it is a space associated with both shame and liberation; anonymity and sexuality; power and vulnerability.

I would like to propose a durational performance art piece for Bath House. I envision this as a site-specific work that would play with constructs of intimacy and domesticity between strangers. I also feel that there are often desires and flirtations that do not include sex, but are sexual and very intimate and also that sometimes sex is just an act or a function to fulfill a need, want or desire.

On May 30, 1981 in Edmonton, police raided the Pisces Spa, which resulted in sixty men being charged as keepers or found-ins in common bawdyhouse. The accused were questioned at a specially arranged 5 am courtroom session permitted under little-used section of Criminal Code. It is my desire to situate an action that is mundane and intimate within this space that is steeped in tradition. I propose to occupy one of the bathhouse rooms and invite other back to the room for some tea, conversations and snacks, over a fifteen-minute period. This meeting would be negotiated between myself and the other person, or two. I intend to perform all the time between 7 to 11 p.m. with two fifteen minute breaks during the evening.. I did ten minute segments, some went longer and I had no break and went for the full four plus hours.

Why Tearoom

Restroom facilities were probably first used for sex in the days before indoor plumbing. In crowded urban areas, where families and neighbors lived in close quarters and privacy was nonexistent, sex could take place unobserved in outhouses.

By the late 19th century, many cities were overcrowded and had poor sanitation. For public health purposes, public restrooms were built in parks and near transportation facilities. Called "comfort stations," these restrooms dotted the landscape in cities from New York to Seattle. However, some men quickly began to use them for a different kind of comfort. As early as 1896, the public facilities in Manhattan's Battery Park and City Hall Park were associated with homosexual activity. The public men's room beneath Seattle's Pioneer Square was a popular cruising area by the first decades of the 20th century. During the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) put the unemployed to work building hundreds of public restrooms in parks across the country, thus giving an inadvertent boost to tearoom activity.

Though it's unclear when and where it originated, the slang term "tearoom" (that is, "t-room," which was short for "toilet-room") enabled men to discuss their public sexual encounters with each other in a coded way. Heterosexuals understood tearooms very differently, as genteel cafes where people enjoyed afternoon tea and pastries.

One historian notes that, ironically, the use of public facilities for homosexual encounters gave men a measure of privacy. Sex in city parks was risky because it was out in the open. For many poor and working-class men, then, public restrooms doubled as private sexual space. The washrooms of New York's subway system were "(the) meeting place for everyone," as one man put it. A businessman on his way home to his wife and children in one of the outer boroughs could engage in quick sex at the end of the workday but still not identify as gay. With the growth of suburbs after World War II, tearoom activity shifted away from urban centers to rest stops on the highways that surrounded cities.

From the very beginning, tearooms fell under police scrutiny. The first arrests in Manhattan occurred soon after the opening of public facilities in 1896. To circumvent arrest, one man would often remain outside the restroom as a lookout, warning those inside if a policeman was approaching. An arrest could ruin a man's life: When newspapers published the names and addresses of those arrested, men lost families, jobs, and housing.

I feel that this is important to situate this title within this work as it still illustrates the need or desire to have spaces that are sites of intimacy for men who have sex with men (MSM) or for individuals that fit within the notorious categories of sexual outlaws.