Airport bathrooms

Senator Craig will, I suspect, be gone within 48 hours. The scandal is above the fold not simply for the usual reasons -- "gay sex!" "sex in the Senate!" "pages (again)!" "Republican hypocrisy on all this faith-and-values nonsense!" "Republican hypocrisy on Clinton!" -- but also because the sex, or the promise of sex rather, was located in an airport bathroom.

First we're back to the fear of bathhouses: it's 1987 all over again. Cue all our phobias about the transmission of AIDS, anonymous sex, and gay underworlds unlegislated and seemingly unaffected by all the social mores so rigorously enforced in our public discourse.

We have heard this summer about sexual solicitation in park bathrooms: remember Bob Allen? That story did not have the traction I predict this will because there are fundamental differences between a bathroom in a public park and a bathroom in an airport. Park bathrooms are already disconcerting, even taboo, for the middle classes, places one frequents only if absolutely necessary, only as a last resort. The very existence of public bathrooms is highly contested as we know, as is the case for most public institutions in our neoliberal era. Public bathrooms are apparently not to be supported any more than the parks themselves: is it still Santa Monica's claim to fame that it provides facilities for the homeless? Thus is it the case that public bathrooms seem rarely, if ever, to be attended, cleansed by hosing, and of course devoid of toilet paper. Think of the "dangers" associated with public bathrooms: needles, waste, an actual encounter with a homeless boogeyman. So it's somehow less scandalous to be caught soliciting in a park bathroom: these spaces are contained, cordoned off, already coded as dangerous and illicit.

Airport bathrooms, on the other hand, are most often steps away from Starbucks and thus in the very heart of the American consumer soul. They exist where we eat and drink; they are integral to the lives of nearly everyone who passes by. Does not everyone use the airport bathroom before a flight? The alternative is of course worse: the airplane bathroom. Airport bathrooms are places to frequent as often as possible precisely to avoid the alternative. Parents can be seen letting their kids go in alone: we're all one big happy family now that the DHS has screened out the bad guys and made airports protected spaces. Is it not the case that we surrender our water bottles and submit to full body searches so that we can regard airplane terminals -- and their bathrooms -- as safe, quasi-domestic public spaces? They contain all of the comforts of home and many comforts not at home: you can after all get massages in terminals now. And let us not forget the shopping for goods for our homes.

To have such a space punctured by sex seems slightly shocking. We expect and even accepted that airplane bathrooms are places for sex. Any mention of the "mile high club" gets the old wink-wink, nudge-nudge. But this might be because they are contained, encapsulated. Airport bathrooms, on the other hand, while they may be part of the general capsule that is the airport itself, are not so enclosed. We think of them as safe and protected spaces and I am even inclined to think they have a bit of that good will and friendly feeling one associates with the public square in a Capra movie: we are all sharing the same experience of travel after all and all the frustrations and joys that come along with it. We're all late, tired, too early, harried, annoyed, delayed, especially delayed, and a certain commiseration and even community, however tenuous, results from this shared experience. There are always kids and grandparents; within a certain class, and even beyond it, there is a significant cross-section of the population on the move. For the bathroom, the one place you can go to wash off the grime of the plane, to be permeated, punctured, for some violated by the thought of sexual solicitation is going to be too much for the American psyche. Janitorial closets in the airport (Six Feet Under) are one thing; the bathrooms another. To think that there is a whole subcultural communicative code at work right at our very feet will be just too much. In fact, there's the thing: straight America is going to have to confront the fact that there is such a code, that gay networks operate, literally, next door.

If Senator Craig had solicited sex in a park bathroom, I'd be inclined to say he could hold his seat and then retire in 2008. Because it was an airport bathroom, I give him until the end of the week, with a resignation timed to coincide with the Labor Day weekend.