Tearoom

American gay slang for a public restroom where men meet for sex; the British call it a cottage.

In American gay slang a tearoom is a public restroom where men meet for sex: a toilet in a park, a train station, a department store or a university basement. You go in for one thing and it isn't tea. The British call the same place a cottage, and what Americans did there, the British called cottaging.

It is an old-fashioned word now, the kind you find in gay history books and in the memories of men who were cruising long before phones did it for them. Nobody under fifty says "tearoom" without a wink.

Where it comes from

The joke is in the sound: toilet room, shortened to t-room, and then dressed up as the genteel tearoom where ladies took their afternoon cup. Green's Dictionary of Slang dates it to 1927, when a psychiatry manual defined a "tea house" as a public lavatory frequented by homosexuals; teahouse and t-room are recorded variants. It was a code word in the full sense: a place you could name in public without anyone straight knowing what you meant.

Tearoom Trade

The word reached the university in 1970 with Tearoom Trade, a study by the sociologist Laud Humphreys of sex in the restrooms of a city park. Humphreys played the "watchqueen", the lookout who coughs when someone is coming, took down the license plates of the men he observed, tracked them to their homes and later interviewed them in disguise as a health survey worker. His most quoted finding was that many of them, more than half, were married men living with their wives, men who would never have called themselves gay. In other words, the tearoom was full of what we would now call down-low men and trade.

The book is now a standard example of unethical research: the men never agreed to be studied, and a list of names and addresses of men having sex in public toilets, at a time when that meant arrest and ruin, was a dangerous thing to keep in a drawer.

Close relatives

• Cottage: the British word for the same place.
• Glory hole: the hole in the partition between stalls, born in the tearoom.
• Bathhouse and backroom: the indoor, private and slightly safer versions of the same need.

Related terms