Backroom

A dark room at the back of a gay bar or club set aside for sex, while the drinking goes on out front; close kin of the darkroom.

A backroom is the room behind the bar where the sex happens: a dark area in a gay bar or club, set aside for men to have sex with each other while the drinking goes on out front. The front of the house is a bar like any other; the back is something else, usually through a curtain, a corridor or an unmarked door.

The word comes from the most ordinary piece of English, the back room of a shop or a pub, and the gay meaning lives entirely in the wink. It overlaps almost completely with darkroom: backroom says where it is, darkroom says what it looks like.

Where it comes from

Nobody can say which bar opened the first gay backroom, and the word is hard to date. An early gay slang glossary defined the backroom as "a dark room in clubs or bars designated for sex". The regular who prefers it to the dance floor is a backroom boy, a pun on the old "backroom boys", the anonymous experts behind the scenes. The filmmaker Derek Jarman used the phrase in his diary in 1992, describing a man who "chalked up his conquests on a blackboard as if he were playing darts".

How it is used today

In the AIDS years backrooms came under the same pressure as the bathhouse, and some closed. The concept survived, especially in Europe and at leather bars and fetish nights, and the word is still the standard question when you check out a new gay bar abroad. On the apps "backroom" in a profile usually means a man who prefers the anonymous version: no chat, no photos, see you there.

Close relatives

• Darkroom: the European name for the same space.
• Glory hole: often built into the walls.
• Cruising: what you do on the way there.
• NSA: the spirit of the place in three letters.

Related terms