I can't believe I'm doing this. Denouncing a movie I haven't even seen. I feel like the Catholic League or something. But sometimes you really don't have to see a film to know the makers have done the wrong thing. I'm speaking of the film Tearoom which was recently shown at the Whitney Biennial in New York, plus at venues in Pittsburgh, Hong Kong, Atlanta and a few others on the intellectual circuit. Put together by William Jones, and apparently pretty much unedited silent footage gleaned from a police sting in Mansfield, Ohio back in the 1960's, this movie, if I'm to understand this, actually does nothing to obscure the identities of the men arrested, many of them likely still alive and maybe still suffering from what surely was a traumatic event from their past. After all, these men didn't just get busted. According to the blog Towleroad, 30 of the men went to prison on state sodomy charges and served at least a year behind bars.

Now Jones and the intellectual set get to stare at them while they grope each other, suck some cock and fuck when they assume no one is looking. According to the accounts I've read, a hidden camera was placed behind a two-way mirror and turned on by cops who wanted to catch guys doing what they had previously not been able to document. In other words, these cruisers were of course attempting in their own ways to be discreet until the cops did something that, at least today, would be against the law in some locales, video-taping a public toilet without full disclosure to those who use it. Adding insult to injury, Jones has also apparently put out a book that, according to his website, displays "100 frame enlargements" which we assume means 100 pictures of guys having sex before they got busted. The publisher of the book states of it: "These stills show men from all walks of life who met for furtive sex under the central square of Mansfield, and who went to jail as the result of a law enforcement sting."

Frankly this is nothing more than exploitation. Surely these men have suffered enough without being subjected to the intellectual pursuits of the thinking classes? They've had their freedoms taken away, their records forever ruined, and now someone out there can see them sucking or fucking in some grainy footage being displayed in museums and theatres. Do I see advantages to releasing footage that shows how under-handed the cops can be? Yes I do, but not if it means revealing the identities of cruisers. We document the tactics of the cops here at Cruising for Sex all the time. We've even been known to publish the names, descriptions and badge numbers of undercover cops. But I believe we've identified the actual names of men who cruise for sex maybe 3 times and each time the person was a public figure who had previously been considered opposed to homosexual behavior -- in other words they were caught cruising while being a big hypocrite. We'd never list names of ordinary men busted in a tearoom and yet Mr. Jones seems to have no moral or ethical dilemma showing real guys having sex just minutes before they get hauled away to jail. Out of simple decency, we urge that this footage be pulled. In fact, Mr. Jones should have done the one and only right thing when he somehow got his hands on the footage and that was to throw it in the garbage. If he couldn't bring himself to do that, giving it to a gay archival collection might be appropriate so that someday students could study how we still, to this day, treat men who cruise for sex. Using it to further promote his film-making career is reprehensible.