Glory hole
A hole cut in a partition, classically between two toilet cubicles, so one man can push his cock through and another can suck it without either showing his face.
A glory hole is a hole cut in a partition, classically the wall between two toilet cubicles, at roughly crotch height. One man puts his cock through it, the man on the other side sucks it, and neither has to show his face. That is the whole point: sex with a stranger reduced to the essentials, with anonymity built into the architecture.
Today the word covers any wall with a hole made for the purpose, from the cubicles of a bathhouse to the booths of an adult video store and the plywood walls of a darkroom. It is not a peephole, though the first glory holes sometimes were just that.
Where it comes from
Glory hole is an old English phrase for a cluttered little space where things get shoved out of sight: a junk cupboard, the space under the stairs, a private den. The gay sense plays on glory as ecstasy, with a nod to "going to glory". Green's Dictionary of Slang finds it in print in 1949, in the underground Gay Girl's Guide, which describes a phallic-sized opening in the partition between toilet booths, and again in the 1964 Lavender Lexicon. A related US sense, a bar where gay men drink, turns up in 1966.
So the glory hole was born in the tearoom, the American public toilet used for sex, and its British cousin the cottage. When being gay meant risking arrest, a wall between you and the other man was also a wall between you and a possible policeman.
How it is used today
Public toilets have mostly been redesigned to make glory holes impossible, and the apps took over the job of finding sex, so the hole moved indoors. Sex clubs, saunas and fetish nights build them on purpose, often as a whole wall of them, and some men set one up at home and advertise it on Grindr with a photo of a hole in a closet door. The appeal is the same as in 1949: no names, no faces, no small talk, the purest form of NSA.
In porn
Glory hole is a whole porn category, and gay porn loves it because the setup does the storytelling: a wall, a hole, a cock, done. It is also one of the places where gay-for-pay scenes play with the fantasy of not knowing, or not caring, who is on the other side.
Anonymity cuts both ways: you don't know who is there, and you can't see what is going on. Clubs with glory holes usually have rules and staff; a hole in a public toilet has neither, and sex in a public lavatory is still an offense in many places.
Related terms
Sources 2
- Green, Jonathon. "glory hole, n.2" Green's Dictionary of Slang, online edition. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/e5jof5a
- Green, Jonathon. "glory hole, n.1" Green's Dictionary of Slang, online edition. https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/fqz7m3i