author Alex Espinoza offers a cultural history of gay hookup sex in public spaces. I was just trying to work out the puzzle of that brazen hole on third-floor Moffitt. I’d never heard of glory holes or hookups in bathrooms, or of a queer culture of desire that ripples inaudibly through public spaces like an ultrasonic whistle only some of us were born to hear. I was still a virgin with men, still figuring it out.
I probably don’t need to explain how my awareness of sex was evolving, how I was still managing my lust for men in secret while declaring outwardly that I liked women. While I studied James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and stressed about my senior thesis, the men’s room was undergoing a silent and illogical transformation. I dismissed it as crazy, an elaborate work of vandalism, but it nagged at me. It was as big in diameter as a Coke can, sometimes lined with wadded toilet paper, and framed with scrawled hieroglyphics (arrows, initials). Someone had taken the time to punch a raw opening through the metal partition separating two stalls. The bathroom - folded within an interior wall, set off, secluded - was weird, though. I had a favorite study carrel at UC Berkeley: third-floor Moffitt Library, northeast corner.
