Marvin Center Days, Part 8 of 13: The tackiest sub-area of MC building manager tasks in the mid-1980s: The “bathroom gays”

There are some amusing memories here, too, along with the more tawdry stuff

(This entry is not meant to say that all gays do the dark stuff discussed here.)

[The phrase in scare quotes above is what I use in retrospect; I forget how this was referred to among some workers at the MC then, but there were various terms, mostly informal I guess. Also, some content of this entry may be offensive to some readers, and is presented not with a sniggering sophomoric attitude but in order to show one very “specialized” focus of our work at the MC then, which was done in part by student workers as well as regular staffers. I won’t make the account too awful. Edits done 3/7/13.]

Subsections below:

A cleaner prelude to the bathroom gays matter

Empirically acquired “police-type” legal competence was involved, not civil-law stuff

Details of the matter (dirty stuff ahead)

What little we managers could do; more grubby sights

Some of us workers made one elaborate joke about the matter (not that we weren’t usually serious about it)

From a longer perspective: Couldn’t more have been done? And what about the threat to health—how serious?

Specific ways we managers “drilled down” into the matter

The moral puzzle, and longer-term lesson, of the mess

I’m glad I kept the MC papers I did. One item is a two-page memo from Wil DeGrasse (see Part 2 for a subsection on him) outlining what assistant managers were to do. This may have been for the student managers only, but it largely reflects what my job included as a staffer, also. One of the numbered items reflects Mr. D’s style of handling issues that reflected his experience as a former military officer (see End note). The following description somewhat humorously mixes a few different assumptions; I’ll explain.

Be alert to all occur[r]ences in the building during your shift. If there exist[s] any reasonable doubt concerning the unauthorized presence of personnel [sic; he meant people generically] in the building, discreetly request Security to check out the suspect(s). The Night Manager [i.e., someone of Mr. D’s rank] MUST BE apprised of such matters prior to Security [getting involved] where it appears that such personnel [sic] pose no immediate threat [I think immediate threat was the key term here] to the peace of the Center. In such cases, Night Manager will [be the one to] inform Security of the existing persona non grata status.

I would suggest that his use of “persona non grata status” at the end is overkill as to standard use of the term; he meant a person that should be escorted out of the building for an emergent reason (for the short term). There actually could be a (permanent) “persona non grata” status for someone (and we can see an example of this in the story of Fern K., if/when I get it ready for posting in the MC series). But this status was conferred by the Security department. I don’t know how, specifically, they did it. I don’t think in those days it reflected the obtaining of a court-type restraining order.

And as to whether universities today would seek a restraining order (from a court outside the university) against an intruder who had reached some threshold of bad behavior (which would, presumably, be repeated, over a period of time), I don’t know. It’s possible a university, as a semi-private entity (if it was a private university and not public), would have its protocols for handling this with its own institutions, such as a security office. Public colleges might have their hands tied a little as to how readily a non-student or non-staffer could be expelled.

Anyway, it would seem that Mr. D’s item that I just quoted would seem to apply to the “bathroom gays,” but I don’t recall if he specifically wrote it for that set of people or not. But it certainly is logically relevant to that (even if it is written a little naively and is lacking in some necessary specifics for more concrete situations).

A cleaner prelude to the bathroom gays matter

I’m not sure when the bathroom gays thing started. It certainly seemed to go on a long time, and to be impervious to remedying. It certainly went on through 1984 and into 1985 (if not through all of 1985, still going when I left), and it probably started in 1983 if not earlier.

As I preluded in Part 4, the problem meant that gays, primarily or exclusively people from outside the university community, were coming to the MC, which was readily accessed from the street through multiple doorways on the ground and first floors, and going to men’s rooms to meet with and have sexual relations with willing partners in the toilet stalls (the partners were, as far as I know, also usually or always outsiders). This was something that was attended to by MC managers (staffers such as myself, as well as student managers) and by those Security personnel who would pass through, or be posted on a per-day basis in, the MC.

I didn’t make explicit elsewhere that, at GW, the Security force was supposed to patrol through the entire campus. Some were in buildings, and some walked the streets on occasion, as I recall. Some were, on given days, specifically assigned to the MC to remain posted there for a shift, especially where there was a big event that might include a little trouble. Security workers—who were dressed like policemen, and had walkie-talkies—could walk calmly through the MC, and just their presence/appearance could be a deterrent to trouble (as was true for us building managers to an extent, and as is true of such workers—who are not policemen—with contract guard companies).

Empirically acquired “police-type” legal competence was involved, not civil-law stuff

I should also make clear that while my decades doing media work since 1990 have seemed to feature a lot of instances of “doing my own legal work” (even in such banal circumstances as an unemployment appeal), this was all lay work in civil legal matters. So far, I have never seen a matter within the media world that went so far as to require criminal legal investigation (at least not that I can think of or have been aware of, or as had been explicitly started—it may have been a possibility that was considered by someone). But in my work years of 1978-90 (pre-editorial years), which included a lot of student-era jobs and a lot of night jobs, to the extent that it fell within our range of duties, just about any “legal situation” that came up happened to be police/enforcement-related. This was true at the MC, and at my Wells Fargo job; there was something of this at a state park job I had in 1987, too. And of course, the mentality involved here is very different from dealing with civil matters in white-collar contexts.

A lot of what you learned in the “policing” mode, as during the MC work, you picked up empirically, or applying broad guidelines to concrete situations. You didn’t do so as a professional policeman; usually, you had Security guards to deal with the matters that required more rigorous police-type work (and since Security at GW wasn’t fully a police force anyway, sometimes the actual D.C. police could be called, by Security, for a serious enough issue).

The bathroom gays matter was highly ambiguous, and highly resistant to mitigation. As a manager, or a member of Security, you could be aware that it generally went on, usually centered on just a couple of the men’s rooms, and you could turn up and try to scare the perpetrators away, but you could never fully stop it (there may have been times when a Security guard escorted one or more off, but I don’t remember if anyone was arrested). It was dealt with very much in an ad hoc, piecemeal, sort-of “whack-a-mole” fashion….

Details of the matter (dirty stuff ahead)

Bathrooms could sometimes be closed. The main bathrooms used were in the lobby areas on the ground floor and on the first floor; less often, if I remember rightly, the second-floor men’s room (in the lobby area) was used (it was outside one main cafeteria, and probably it wasn’t much used by the gays because it could be more frequented by students from the cafeteria who just wanted to use the facilities).

The ground floor men’s room was a real pit; I disliked going in there to “patrol,” because it could be both close/stinky due to use by the gays and besotted with cigarette smoke (the latter only sometimes?). There was just something permanently grubby and disreputable about it. It was also the men’s room most “off the beaten track” as far as ordinary use by students was concerned, so it was the WC of choice for the gays. It was like a men’s room in a subway or airport that you didn’t like to use because of the disreputable vagrant types likely to be there.

I recall that one men’s room was closed (locked) a lot of the time—it might have been the first floor one. But if one bathroom (that had been favored for gays activity) was locked, that might mean the behavior would turn up more elsewhere.

There were also two bathrooms on the ground floor, way in a back area not used by MC patrons much, which were connected to what were called “shower rooms” or such—I don’t recall these being used much for actual showers at all in my time there. Well, these bathrooms I think were almost always locked, or certainly they tended to be after the bathroom-gay problem was getting worse. They were enough hidden from normal public traffic that they were perfect for trysts. (When Andy Cohen was at the height of his heroin use at the MC, he would use one of these bathrooms for shooting up, from what I heard.)

What little we managers could do; more grubby sights

A lot of the work done here by us managers was a sort of game of cat-and-mouse. You walked in the men's room, with your big set of keys (ordinarily, MC managers could use—carry with them during a shift—one of two sets; one was on a huge ring, and did a lot of jingling). You also had a walkie-talkie, as a usual part of your job. Per your discretion, you could turn the squelch button on the radio in order to have it make a rasping sound, and this could make you sound in a listener’s view like, “Uh oh, a Security guy is here.” One or more times, when I did that in a men’s room suspected of housing gays, suddenly several toilets would flush at once, as if the gays opted to pretend they were just there to…you know.

The stinkier men’s rooms—primarily the ground floor one—could smell not just of stinky bodies (one Security guard whose youthful Black face I can picture—I can’t remember his name—said it smelled like “funk!”—not the music, of course). A bathroom could also smell of amyl nitrate, what was called “poppers”—a drug used by gays as a muscle relaxant.

Once I saw parts of naked bodies below the level of the closed stall door. I think they shrunk out of sight when I turned my squelch button, or such. Such sights led us managers—on off hours, away from the public—to employ some form of gallows humor—and of course, being around college age, this sort of thing came naturally.

Some of us workers made one elaborate joke about the matter (not that we weren’t usually serious about it)

Toward the end of my time at the MC, I think in November 1985, a group of student managers and I stayed really late, after the MC was closed, and had ourselves a sort of informal party. We drank beer in the restaurant-y place on the MC’s fifth floor called the Rathskeller—I don’t recall who supplied the beer—and we recorded fake interviews/commentary routines and actual visual displays on videotape (there was a fake news broadcast, and some variety-show type thing; some of this was done in the “dance studio” in the theater section of the MC, which had mirrors on the wall that added to the visual fun). I wish I had kept the videotape. It was a VHS thing that was stowed in Jim Pritchett’s desk—I think it was probably recycled or discarded, a pity.

Anyway, we lampooned the issue of the bathroom gays with a videotaping of—when no one else was around, of course—one of the managers going into one of the men’s room stalls, with a mannequin we must have gotten from the theater (it had some svelte female shape, if I recall). And as part of the sophomoric depiction, the legs of the mannequin extended from under the closed stall door, and as the depiction went on, they were dragged into the stall out of sight…. This made a comic routine out of something that was, in sober circumstances, rather tawdry.

From a longer perspective: Couldn’t more have been done? And what about the threat to health—how serious?

If the whole thing sounds tacky if not downright disgusting, I don’t blame you. Looking back from an older perspective, I would say that today people could readily consider this and say, Why didn’t GW do more about this? Surely if this sort of thing went on today at all range of colleges, with the access to media being so much more prevalent and instant—obviously, someone could use a smart phone and have a video representation of a bathroom-gay sight of some sort on YouTube within a couple hours—it would never be allowed to go on as it did in the 1980s.

Well, the answer is that people did their best, but it was a problem very impervious to easy solutions. One idea, to close all the men’s rooms (that is, each men’s room on every lobby from the ground floor to the fifth) was considered at one point, but obviously it wouldn’t fly due to student comfort needs. (I’m trying to recall—there were men’s rooms in other parts of the MC, but the ones most well known about by students were in the lobby areas, which are the ones the gays targeted, mainly on the ground and first floors.) By the way, this thing did not go on at all with the female bathrooms. Lesbians, overall, have struck me as less aggressive and intrusive with their private-satisfaction behaviors [this may seem redundant, gratuitous, to say, but is meant to contrast the ridiculous male-gay behavior under discussion], and the male bathroom gays in the MC would never have been so boundary-crossing at to use the women’s rooms.

In terms of enforcement, the issue, I believe, was more formally within the province of Security, which had, of course, some kind of panoply of legal means to deal with this. I don’t recall if anyone was arrested, but this would not have been much out of line. But we student managers could easily be “on the front lines” of witnessing particular instances of WC-gay behavior, because Security was not always around; indeed, being the eyes for certain developments where Security had to be called was a regular part of our job.

Though obviously a threat to health would seem to appertain to the bathroom-gays issue, and though AIDS, which was only starting to become a public issue by 1984, was considered among some of us MC workers, we students who worked at the MC could be astute about it. I remember, very distinctly, having a conversation with a fellow manager—a Filipino guy, if I recall, and I don’t remember his name (he was a nice guy)—where we noted how, with AIDS, the only way you could get it was through direct exposure via bodily fluids. (Thus, to take an abstract example, if you had an open cut that somehow came into contact with a toilet seat used by an AIDS patient who had sat on it able to leave bodily fluids on it, you had some risk of contracting AIDS. But this specific type of situation was very, very rarely, if ever, to happen in anyone’s usual business within MC restrooms.)

I remember saying to this fellow worker that some people seemed to talk as if the AIDS virus could hop from a surface to someone’s drink, or such (I don’t remember what my particular tone or angle was with this), and the Filipino coworker said, Yes, it’s a psychological thing, meaning that there was, among some, a paranoia about how AIDS could be contracted that didn’t square with the reality. Accordingly, we weren’t so worried in going into the restrooms where the trysting gays were, as if we could be liable to contracting AIDS there. That reflected how we talked about the matter in an enlightened way in 1984 or so. And such talk could be done, among other topics or contexts that were much broader, responsibly enough within the following decades.

Two related issues are:

(1) Other forms of disease could be spread by the WC gays to GW students, theoretically, especially when you didn’t know how much hygiene was exercised by the non-GW types that came in to do their WC-gay thing. This certainly was a reasonable fear, especially when you smelled the unhealthy stench of the ground floor men’s room.

(2) A more obvious problem, though one more based on irrationality, is that sheer perception by people in the GW community at large could mean that people would raise a storm about WC gays using the MC restrooms, and this could mean a health threat, and (they could say) what was anyone doing about it?

And as we know from plenty of examples in the media over many years, public fear, rooted in people’s not being educated enough, can provide a bigger tide that fosters big, if not precipitous, administrative changes more than do calmly presented solutions by people who are enlightened about the matter at hand. In fact, I don’t recall the bathroom-gay matter being widely known about at GW—I think the MC and Security tried to quash its presence on their own in as low-key a fashion as possible—but of course, it was very much resistant to resolution.

Specific ways we managers “drilled down” into the matter

I don’t recall any student managers who refused to get involved in the matter in any sort of principled way. I do remember one student manager, who could probably be said (in this connection, at least) to have been anti-gay, to be enthusiastic about tackling the issue in his daily rounds in the limited way we had, such as to go in and “show our presence” and let fear get the gays heading furtively out. I don’t know if he had any particular measures he took (of some idiosyncratic or especially effective type) to scare the gays away.

I remember one cat-and-mouse incident that I was in the midst of. Much of the time, you never saw a bathroom gay either coming or going who could be identified as such; usually, you suspected they were around when, inside the WC, all the stalls in a men’s room were occupied and there were other suggestive signs (such as the smell of “poppers” or, obviously more notorious—and rare—two pairs of legs in one closed stall). But once I caught a guy (coming out of a men’s room [?]—I don’t precise know how/when I first saw him) who was clearly one of these guys, and I started following him pointedly. I, of course, had my radio and keys and probably looked like “the heat” to him. He scurried along through an MC lobby, took some stairs to another floor. I think I followed him—we got quicker as the “chase” went on—up to a higher-level lobby (on the fourth floor, where student-organization offices were), and then to a lower-level one. We moved quicker, fire doors going wump…. Finally he hurried out of the building, when he could, almost in a panic.

I couldn’t do more than this; part of the reason is that I couldn’t get close enough to him to talk to him. And even if I could talk to him, how well would that work? Plus, as a student manager, I wasn’t empowered to confront him, to ask for ID or such, as I believe Security could. (I don’t recall if members of Security could—in such a situation, or otherwise—arrest people, or just could do a “citizen’s arrest.” Actually, a “citizen’s arrest” is also what you’re limited to if you work for a contract guard service: you’re not trained or empowered to make an official arrest, though your guard outfit makes you look like a policeman.)

Anyway, chasing this man was enough. It was somehow frustrating, I think, but also rewarding in some way that if I kept up the sudden, ad hoc chase, he might be scared enough never to come back to the MC.

The moral puzzle, and longer-term lesson, of the mess

This “chase” was one good example of what rooted my beholding the overall bathroom-gay situation with mystification and moral indignation for, basically, all the years since. These men were a cross between deviously mischievous boys and adult men engaging in borderline-illegal, if not downright illegal, acts. They were in a twilight zone of acceptable behavior, and seemed somehow to flourish in what they did partly as a result of this twilight quality. It was like drug addicts or sexual perverts: the marginalized, clandestine behavior seemed to be partly potentiated by its ambiguous, off-the-social-grid nature. The deviancy of it provided some thrill, perhaps.

I have wondered how, if someone was satisfied and serene with being a gay person—as was surely true among a host of gays at that time (as well as since then)—then why would the person want to meet for trysts in stalls of the restroom of a university student union (as I said, I think most of the time, the trysts were with other non-GW people), creating a bit of a not-widely-known scandal and attracting the sporadic but intent attention of Security guards and MC managers when we became aware of an incident that needed quelling? Why pose the risk to health in the MC that seems not unreasonable for normal patrons to consider—or at least the potential for public notoriety about the situation? Why did these bathroom gays pose possible health risks to themselves?

But as I said in Part 4, the trend of some gays meeting for trysts in public facilities like a YMCA has gone on for an apparently very long time. I am by no means holding myself out as an expert on this sort of thing. What I do know is I saw a very pungent, disturbing instance of the type of restroom-trysting that, as is more broadly known, gays have engaged in (at least among a subset of their group). And regardless of actual statistics on their use of YMCAs, the example of the MC left an indelible impression on you about the strange, stubborn, almost self-deluding deviancy of this behavior. I’m sure other MC workers who dealt with this to some degree came away from it with some impression similar in some regard to what I say here.

In any event, that was one area of “responsibility” we had at the MC that makes for the most disgusting anecdotes to tell.

Other deviancy from my Marvin Center Days that I have to discuss smells less like “funk,” in the words of that one Security guard.

End note.

I would suggest that it helps those who want to understand more police-related procedure in workplaces if you have worked somewhere that included retired military men. When I worked for Wells Fargo’s contract guard services in 1989-90, there was/were one or two ex-military men there too, and that type of work paralleled one aspect of the MC manager work—which also explains why some contract guard services like ex-military men: in the military (in which I’ve never served), it’s likely you have to learn two things, amid whatever else: to deal with boring conditions much of the time, but to be ready to “hop to” and deal with emergencies with full presence of mind and bringing your particular training to bear, when needed.