Lust Room

Over the past decade, liberals have rallied around the cause of gender-inclusive public restrooms, putatively as a way to provide trans and gender-nonconforming people with access to safe facilities, while also building a social movement for gender freedom. At the same time, liberals have remained largely silent on the ongoing surveillance, harassment, assault, arrest, and public shaming of men who cruise public restrooms. How might we make sense of this discrepancy? This essay offers a hypothesis for this relative silence: cruising is intolerable to liberals insofar as it evokes the pleasure of antisocial and self-shattering relations, thereby threatening social commitments. This hypothesis helps explain why liberals, in defending trans and gender-nonconforming peoples’ restroom access, have characterized and reinforced restrooms as nonsexual spaces, effectively insulating gender non-normativity from the stain of sexual perversion. The issues of restroom access and cruising are thus more closely related than they may initially appear to be, as are the liberal silence surrounding cruising and conservative transphobia and transmisogyny.