A 20-year-old Northwestern student comes home from a party on Saturday, alone and a little drunk. He goes on Craigslist and posts an ad “looking for some guys around my age to have some discreet, clean fun.”
He lists brown hair, brown eyes, and a height of 5 feet, 10 inches. It has to happen “soon, before I pass out,” he says, but it’s about 3:30 in the morning so there probably aren’t many people online to read his post. The next night around eight o’clock, he’s studying in the library and thinks about it again. He makes another post looking for “a nice study break,” but it needs to be convenient — maybe in the bathrooms nearby. “Send me an instant message over AIM at ‘deeringboi’ right now to set something up — im waiting.”
Last year, Senator Larry Craig was arrested for allegedly propositioning an undercover cop by tapping his foot inside a bathroom stall — a code from the “tea room trade” of the 1960s and ‘70s. But on the Internet, there are more-advanced ways to anonymously hook up. An archive of male-to-male Evanston personals on Craigslist for last November shows that nearly 70 listings soliciting sex appeared to be posted by Northwestern students or men looking for Northwestern students — an average of more than two a day.
Many of these came from repeat posters whose ads were vaguely similar, if not exact duplicates of each other: The 25-year-old graduate student with the Calvin Klein underwear. The 21-year-old student-athlete who’s curious about guys but “needs to be really discreet.” Craigslist, like a neighborhood bar, has its own regulars and drifters. “You could probably make a general consensus that people who post are usually older, they don’t do relationships,” says John, a sophomore who used Craigslist from April to August last year, when he became “bored” by routine sexual encounters with strangers. (His name has been changed for privacy.)
For a generation of gay men, online personals aren’t just a new form of advertising — they’re a new way to have sex. Though John lost his virginity to a man he met through Manhunt, another gay-personals site, he’s never actually heard the phrase “tea room” and he’s never had sex in a bathroom. On the Internet, he can connect to any number of men, and with a lot more security than at Fisk Hall or the main library, two of the more-popular tea rooms on campus. When John used to scan listings on Craigslist, he looked for guys around his age or ones with pictures, and as a rule he avoided regular posters or anal sex. To be safe, he would sometimes type a guy’s address into a Word document before leaving the house.
The careful anonymity of Craigslist also gives an outlet to men who might not otherwise feel like they have one, whether that’s closeted gays, uncomfortable bisexuals or the freshman who’s “not out yet” but wants to experiment. Of the 69 ads archived from November, the word “discreet” appears in 23 of them, far more than other common gay-personals terms such as “safe,” “masculine” or “D/D free” (drug- and disease-free). That suggests respondents either seek out privacy specifically or don’t want people to know that they’re using Craigslist to find sexual partners.
This emphasis on discreetness might make Craigslist look like a hideout for Northwestern’s collective closet. And in some ways it is. When John started trading e-mails with one prospective hook-up, the two realized that they knew each other from class. A sophomore fraternity member with a girlfriend, the other student also turned out to be a bisexual who’s not at all public about whom (or what gender) he sleeps with. “I know some people who have been outed because they hooked up with someone who didn’t keep their mouth shut,” John says. “It’s an issue of privacy, I think.”
But lots of men like to have casual sex for many different reasons, and so the issue of who uses Craigslist and why isn’t always clear. For a certain type of gay man, Craigslist may be more convenience than compulsion. “If someone is just out there doing it, and they’re deriving pleasure and not feeling it’s interfering with their lives, I’m not looking to tell them that they ought to change,” says Professor Fred Berlin of the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic, “and they’re not usually looking to come in to try to change.”
Though John eventually found Craigslist and Manhunt unsatisfying, he doesn’t begrudge the gay man who uses them to get some action on occasion — as long as he doesn’t expect anything more. After all, John first logged on after it simply became too much work to find guys on campus. “I think once you start hooking up, if you stop altogether, it kind of builds up,” he says. “I’m a pretty lazy person.”
Sometime between 1980 and 1985, Kevin Leonard found a piece of paper wedged inside the glass display case in Deering Library, which today houses Northwestern’s university archives. It was an illustrated, black-and-white flyer that had been circulated around campus: “If you’re into any kind of man to man sex mutual or one-way stand by parking meter #1 in the lot just to the east of Kresge Hall.” Leonard, who has been working at the archives longer than he can remember, filed it immediately. “It’s an artifact of something that happened on campus,” he says. [Click here to see the undoctored flyer — but don't open it at work!]
When I first ask Leonard about his research into Northwestern’s history of anonymous gay sex, he sounds apologetic. “Unfortunately, this is all I have,” he told me. While Leonard, the university’s associate archivist, also remembers a newspaper advertisement that has been lost to time, the Kresge ad remains the only explicit reminder of a time during the ‘70s and early ‘80s when campus tea rooms had a reputation all their own, particularly in Deering, where men would wait on benches for their turn in the stalls. “It was known here, it was known all over campus,” Leonard says. “It was like Studio 54 — it was a happening place.”
Leonard’s discovery began as a way to explain Library Staff Announcement #824, a routine document about the closing of the Deering Library men’s room effective February 27, 1985. What the document doesn’t mention is why the bathroom was shut down or the controversy that ensued. Everything started, Leonard recalls, when a visiting scholar from another university went into the bathroom and was solicited for sex. “Apparently he raised hell about it,” he says, and a debate sprang up between two groups: those who still wanted to be able to relieve themselves in Deering and figured the university was overreacting, and those who felt more than a little skeezed out.
The lock installed on the Deering men’s room door in 1985 hasn’t been used for many years, though Leonard can neither remember nor find documentation on when it was re-opened. When you walk in now, the bathroom looks old and a little dingy but otherwise unremarkable. You wouldn’t guess that the university once hired a not-quite-undercover cop to sit in a stall fully uniformed, waiting for the action to come to him. “I get police reports,” says Al Cubbage, the vice president of university relations, when asked about anonymous sex on campus, “and I haven’t seen anything like that in years.”
John Rechy’s 1963 City of Night is known as the first major novel about gay sex. In it, a nameless hustler moves from one city to another, briefly entering the lives of scores, queens and other “youngmen” in parks, bars and — sometimes — bathrooms. With each new place, there is the sense that Rechy’s character tries to erase what came before, even as he continually repeats himself. “Then it was over,” he says about one encounter. “The orgasms have made us strangers again. All the words between us are somehow lost, as if, at least for this moment, they have never been spoken.”
Following World War II, City of Night spoke to the slow emergence of a national gay identity, when furtive glances and handjobs in late-night movie theaters turned into the Stonewall riots of 1969 and, finally, the AIDS crisis. For the first time, homosexual men recognized themselves as a group. If the university hadn’t closed the Deering bathroom, Leonard wonders, would men still have had sex in it? “In the mid-‘80s, that was just when people first started talking about AIDS,” he says. “It was a busy place then. If you go in there now, you won’t see anything.”
Gay men, at least at Northwestern, don’t have anonymous sex like they used to. Rainbow Alliance, which started as a closely guarded support group for closeted members in the 1970s, has become a platform for open gay culture, such as drag shows and speaker events. But what’s left of that world, existing mostly on Craigslist and Manhunt, remains an open secret. The occasional tea room listing still shows up, whether it’s for the library or the basement of Fisk, where you can sometimes find notes and phone numbers written on the walls.
Scanning the posts on Craigslist, it’s hard not to think of Rechy’s hustler codes. Though most straight personals avoid sex, at least directly, male-to-male ads usually request it by the act. There are the older “scores” looking for young guys and the emphasis on “masculinity” or “straight-acting” men, which appears in 21 ads from November. Because Northwestern’s gay community is so public, it’s easy to forget that another community of active homosexual men exists almost exclusively online. “The ones I hooked up with were gay. I don’t know how closeted or not closeted they were, but they weren’t active in the gay community, or else I wouldn’t have hooked up with them,” John says. “They wouldn’t identify with the gay community.”
Craigslist makes finding hook-ups a lot easier, but convenience can’t be the only reason people use it. Would a gay man use Craigslist — with the risks and embarrassment that it entails — if he could meet gay men in everyday life? Most of the men who come to Dr. Berlin deal with some kind of identity conflict. “I see people who want to be faithful, who don’t like the sneaking around, they worry about the detection,” he says. “Obviously there’s something pushing them to do that, but then there’s this other part of them that’s trying to resist. I don’t mean to trivialize it, but it’s almost like the dieter who tries not to eat and yet their appetite keeps pushing them until they give into temptation.”
When I ask John about his sexuality, I’m surprised to find out that he doesn’t identify as gay, even though he’s only had sex with men and never dated a girl. “I don’t know,” he says before pausing. “I don’t really like to limit myself. I am attracted to girls, and there are girls who I would want to be in a relationship with. But I think sexually, it’s a lot easier to hook up with guys, because I don’t get as emotionally attached to guys. There have only been one or two guys I’ve fallen emotionally attached to.”
Everything that’s true offline is true online — it’s just a lot easier to play the game. Even though Deering isn’t the tea room it used to be, anonymous sex at Northwestern hasn’t gone the way of the past. Men still like to have lots of sex, and some gay men still put discreetness before everything else. For them, Craigslist is the best of both worlds: You can find someone to sleep with on your way home from class, you can see what they look like and where they live—and no one has to know about it. “If you’re just looking for sex with no strings,” John says, “then it’s completely gratifying.”