(Full disclosure: I’m a Schwules* employee in the curation and exhibition department.) And while many modern queers would rather forget this chapter of their people's sordid past, public restrooms are undeniably places where community and connection were kindled among us against unlikely odds. “Mischief in public toilets left more traces in vice squad logbooks than in high literature,” photographer Marc Martin writes in the introduction to his new exhibition at Berlin’s Schwules* Museum, Fenster Zum Klo : Public Toilets, Private Affairs. Of the places queer people have transformed into sites to cruise for sex-from parks like the Central Park Ramble and Berlin’s Tiergarten, to sanctums like Provincetown’s Dick Dock and Fire Island’s Meat Rack-few have impacted the queer psyche like the public restroom.
