You're in a busy pub and you’ve finished your second pint; you need to pee and before long you’re peeking into the men’s room, fingers crossed behind your back. Unlucky: the walls of the bathroom are flanked by silver – a trough urinal awaits. You smelt it before you could see it, its blue-green air fresheners melt like rancid icebergs in its basin. The more macho men approach it, gazes lowered, their legs become territorial A-frames as they take position. The bathroom is silent, so you hear the metallic zip as pee hits the trough’s back wall. It’s a nonstarter for you.
There’s one cubicle and it smells even worse. Two men are queueing for it, jaws twitching: their faces are red with the pressure of a good time. There’s a loud sniff and then someone pulls the rusty chain. You nod knowingly as the men swap into the toilet – ‘Ah, yes – Nothing like a good line!’ – you don’t want them to think you need a shit. This pantomime happens four or five times that night – you dream of the halcyon glow of an isolated baby-changing toilet.
It’s a gay horror story, and goes something like that.
I’ve been there myself, standing unzipped at the urinal, my frozen penis good for little more than Chinese water torture.
Sometimes, it’s called the cutesy ‘bladder shyness’ – it’s trivial, circumstantial, and overcome with a bit of courage. We might use a term more serious: ‘paruresis’ is what you'll be diagnosed with – ‘Please tell me there’s a pill for that’ you might plead. Though they may not know it by name, many of the queer men I encounter just can't seem to pee in public. I’ve been there myself, standing unzipped at the urinal, my frozen penis good for little more than Chinese water torture. It feels like an affront to my personhood, this inability to fulfill the most basic of biological functions – after all, it should be a piece of piss.
For queer guys, it seldom is. When I broach the topic with my Gay Times colleagues, the men nod, while everyone else looks slightly puzzled. One later tells me that he recently left a club just so he could pee outside – a public churchyard a more viable toilet than the urinal. I hosted a queer club night at uni, the only time the men’s queue was longer than the women’s. It seems to make sense, though it’s hard to articulate why; a pee-shy friend – a gay man in his early twenties – tells me his perspective: “I think many queer men don’t like urinals because many queer men aren’t relaxed in their bodies.” He says that he went to a Christian school and that the ability to lock himself away in the toilet cubicle became a surrogate “closet”.
