👮 the return of queer entrapment 👮

QUEER WORD
TEAROOM STING

What It Means:

An undercover police operation in a public toilet where officers pose as interested parties, or watch through hidden surveillance, to arrest men for solicitation or public indecency.

The term itself was first coined in mid 20th-century America; ‘tearoom’ is slang for public toilet, and ‘sting’ is slang for a setup or entrapment operation.

Let’s Use It In A Sentence:

I thought that maybe I’d met my future husband at the train station bathroom. Turned out it was just a tearoom sting.

A little bit of history:

All the way back in 1914, two actors were hired by the Long Beach Police Department to enter public restrooms, engage with any man they thought appeared homosexual, and then set up the local police to make arrests for lewd behaviour. About thirty-three men were rounded up, handcuffed and, from there, pretty much run out of town.

It was arguably the first documented undercover sting operation run by American police.

And it was happening at a strange time in history. The political climate was one of intense moral regulation, with all the conversations that would lead to Prohibition swirling across the country. Progressive Era reformers were obsessed with ‘cleaning up’ cities, and demanding that people ‘think of the children’ whilst claiming to be fighting to restore good Christian values to society.

Hmm... Sound familiar?

In this climate homosexual men were an easy target. Homosexuality was still considered both a crime and a disease, something to be rooted out and punished. And so the arrests were heralded as a victory for public decency.

[side note - There's something almost comically ironic about the whole thing to me. The police hired actors, members of that famously non-heterosexual profession, to pretend to be gay in order to catch actual gay men.

Were the actors just thinking ‘hey, a gig’s a gig!’?

But I digress…]

And then it spread…

From here on out, tearoom stings became a fixture of American law enforcement. The practice spread from bustling cities to small unsuspecting towns throughout the rest of the twentieth century. 

It become so popular as a practice that police departments even made training films to teach other departments how to set up hidden cameras behind two-way mirrors, how to position decoys at urinals, and how to entrap men ‘more effectively’. 

I kid you not. 

In 1962, police in Mansfield, Ohio spent two weeks filming men through a bathroom mirror and later turned the footage into a training video complete with, according to William E Jones, the artist who rediscovered it decades later, ‘hateful narration.’ 

So far, so unsurprising, right?

By the 1970s, Michigan police were openly calling these operations ‘bag-a-f*g’ stings. And in California alone, an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 men were arrested in decoy operations between 1979 and 2018.

So what? Isn’t public sex illegal?

Now, you might be thinking ‘sure, but if people are having sex in public bathrooms, isn't that a legitimate law enforcement concern? Aren’t the police just doing their job? Surely the men don’t expect to just get away with it?’

And, yeah, I can understand where you’re coming from. On the surface, it seems straightforward. But when you look at how these operations actually worked, and who they targeted, we get in to all sorts of murky territory.

First, the enforcement was never equally applied. When police encountered heterosexual couples engaging in similar behaviour - making out in parks, screwing around in cars, having sex in bathrooms - they were typically given a warning and sent on their way. 

But queer men? Arrested, charged, publicly shamed. Names were published in newspapers alongside their addresses and occupations. It’s not hyperbolic to say that lives were ruined. One 1974 sting in San Diego saw a prominent doctor's name splashed across the local paper after he was caught in a department store bathroom. It was a tactic of public humiliation, ensuring most men would plead guilty rather than fight the charges and risk further exposure.

Second, these operations were rarely responses to actual complaints. When civil rights lawyers started requesting documentation of citizen complaints that supposedly prompted the stings, police departments often couldn't produce any. In 2016 a California judge threw out a case after finding that Long Beach police had designed their ‘morality unit’ operation explicitly to ‘ensnare men who engage in homosexual sex’. This was not because anyone had complained, but because the police force had wanted to do it. At best you could view that as moral policing, but at worst It’s state sanctioned persecution. 

Third, even if we accept that public sex is a problem worth addressing, undercover stings are a spectacularly ineffective way of fixing things. You know what actually works? Better lighting in toilets. Signs. Regular uniformed patrols in the area. Changing the design of the space. None of these things require hiding behind a mirror with a camera, and none of them waste thousands of hours of police time on entrapment and arresting people for consensual acts.

Ugh. Ok. You can probably sense my simmering rage, so let’s move on…

Two steps forward, two steps back…

For a while there, it seemed like things were moving toward somewhere positive. The striking down of sodomy laws with the Lawrence v. Texas case in 2003 (another side note: 2003! That is not very long ago!) made it harder to criminalise people just for being gay. And an increased confidence from the queer community saw civil lawsuits raised throughout the 2000s and 2010s that forced police departments to abandon decoy operations. 

In fact, in 2022, the Port Authority Police Department in New York settled a lawsuit brought against them and agreed to end bathroom stings entirely, introduce LGBTQ+ sensitivity training for staff, and even create gender-neutral restrooms.

But, you know how it goes. Two steps forward, and then two steps back. Because then came June 2025.

Yup, June. Pride Month.

Amtrak police launched an aggressive crackdown at Penn Station in New York City, arresting nearly 200 men in the station bathrooms. Undercover officers hid in stalls. They posed at urinals. They made eye contact, signalled interest, waited for a response, and then made arrests. About twenty of those arrested were handed over to ICE for deportation proceedings.

And when New York lawmakers wrote to Amtrak calling the operation ‘reminiscent of anti-LGBTQ policing from the Stonewall era’ the organisation responded with the practically-cut-and-paste-from-the-1950s response that they're just trying to ‘maintain a safe and welcoming environment for all travellers.’

I’m fairly sure that those travellers that were arrested would disagree, but sure.

The role of technology

And, depressingly, in some ways the police's job is much easier now. In the past, officers had to rely on word-of-mouth or tip-offs to find cruising spots. Now they can just log onto an app. The Penn Station bathrooms had become popular on Sniffies—a hookup app that's a bit like Grindr but with more of a focus on anonymous encounters and sharing details of cruising locations. What was once discovered through whispered recommendations or happenstance can now be found by anyone with a smartphone. The app makes it easier to find places and people, which also makes it easier for police to find you. Technology that was supposed to make queer life safer (and more fun!) has instead created a digital trail leading straight to the cells of undercover cops.

So what's actually happening here?

Is this just routine law enforcement, or something else?

I know I posed that as a rhetorical question, and I’m definitely open to other, more generous views. But, to me, it looks as though we’re watching the return of a very old playbook - one that uses the language of ‘public safety’ and ‘decency’ to justify targeted harassment of queer men. It's no coincidence that it’s happening at the same moment we're seeing renewed legislative attacks on trans people, moral panics about drag shows, and endless bad-faith arguments about who belongs in which bathroom (bathrooms. why are they so obsessed with bathrooms?). 

The conditions that led to those 1914 arrests over 100 years ago - moral panic, political scapegoating, a desire to keep queer people frightened and small - haven't gone away. They were just lying in rest, waiting for the right conditions to pop out again. 

The Penn Station crackdown isn't about protecting travellers. It's about control. It's about making sure we stay quiet, stay hidden, stay grateful for whatever scraps of tolerance we're thrown. The fact that one of the men arrested at Penn Station claims to have been singled out for no reason other than the fact that he was wearing a rainbow bracelet, sends a message to every queer person who sees that story… 

You are not safe. Stay in line. Know your place.

I know it sounds like I'm doom-mongering. And I hate when I don't have a neat conclusion at the end of an article. But I'm not sure there is one.

What I do know is this: the fight isn't over. It never really stopped—we just got lulled into thinking it had.