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The word "cottage", usually meaning a small, cosy, countryside home, is documented as having been in use during the Victorian era to refer to a public toilet and by the 1960s its use in this sense had become an exclusively homosexual slang term. This usage is predominantly British, though the term is occasionally used with the same meaning in other parts of the world. Among gay men in the United States in the early 1970s, lavatories used for this purpose were called tea rooms.Rodgers, Bruce Gay Talk (The Queen’s Vernacular): A Dictionary of Gay Slang New York:1972 Parragon Books, an imprint of G.P. Putnam’s Sons Page 195.In 1970, an American graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis, Laud Humphreys published a famous and controversial PhD dissertation, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places, on the tearoom phenomenon, attempting to categorize the diverse social backgrounds and personal motives. See .
Since the 1980s, more individuals in authority have become more aware of the existence of cottages in places under their jurisdiction; as such, they have reduced the height of (or even removed doors from) the cubicles of popular cottages, or extended the walls between the cubicles to the floor to prevent foot signalling.
The internet brought significant changes to cottaging, which was previously an activity engaged in by men with other men, often in silence with no communication beyond the markings of a cubicle wall. Today, an online community is being established in which men exchange details of locations, discussing aspects such as when it receives the highest traffic, when it is safest and to facilitate sexual encounters by arranging meeting times. The term cybercottage is used by some gay and bisexual men who use the role-play and nostalgia of cottaging in a virtual space or as a Bulletin board to arrange real life anonymous sexual encounters.
Laud Humphrey's Tearoom Trade, published in 1970, was a sociological analysis and observance between the social space public "restrooms" (as toilets are euphemistically known in the US) offer for anonymous sex and the men—either closeted, gay, or straight—who sought to fulfill sexual desires that their wives, religion, or social lives could not. The study, which was met with praise on one side due to its innovation and criticism on the other due to having outed "straight" men and risked their privacy, brought to light the multidimensionality of public restrooms and the intricacy and complexity of homosexual sex amongst self-identifying straight men.
In 2024 the toilet block became a part of Qtopia Sydney, a museum that has an extensive collection of objects related to queer culture in Sydney and the toilet block has hosted "exhibitions exploring Sydney's gay beat, sauna and cruising culture of the 1980s and 90s."
Historically, in the United Kingdom, public gay sex often resulted in a charge and conviction of gross indecency, an offence only pertaining to sexual acts committed by males and particularly applied to homosexual activity. Anal penetration was a separate and much more serious crime that came under the definition of buggery. Buggery was a capital offence between 1533 and 1861 under UK law, although it rarely resulted in a death sentence. Importuning was an offer of sexual gratification between men, often for money. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 permitted sex between consenting men over 21 years of age when conducted in private, but the act specifically excluded public lavatories from being "private". The Sexual Offences Act 2003 replaced this aspect with the offence of "Sexual activity in a public lavatory" which includes solo masturbation.
In some of the cases where people were brought to court for cottaging, the issue of entrapment arose. Since the offences were public but often carried out behind closed lavatory doors, the police sometimes found it easier to use undercover police officers, who would frequent toilets posing as homosexuals in an effort to entice other men to approach them for sex. Clifford Williams, "Gay men and the police 1950-2010" in The Journal of the Police History Society (2019) These men would then be arrested for importuning or soliciting and in some cases indecent assault.
Timeline of historic cases
1943 Newspaper editor Clarence McNulty
1946 Mowbray Baronets, was fined for men at Piccadilly Circus Underground station. 1940s Labour MP Tom Driberg was charged with indecent assault after two men shared his bed in the 1940s and used his position as a journalist several times to get off later charges when caught soliciting in public toilets by the police. 1953 Actor John Gielgud was arrested and fined £10 for cottaging ("persistently importuning"). 1953 MP William J. Field was arrested for persistently importuning in a public toilet. Field appealed against the conviction twice but failed on both occasions. 1954 American mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. arrested in a public toilet in Santa Monica, California. He was stripped of his top-secret security clearance and fired from the think tank where he was a consultant. 1956 Sir David Milne-Watson was fined for importuning at South Kensington railway station. 1962 On 6 November 1962, actor Wilfrid Brambell was arrested in a toilet in Shepherd's Bush for persistently importuning. 1962 In 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department conducted a sting operation in which they covertly filmed men having sex in the public restroom underneath Central Park. Thirty-eight men were convicted and jailed for sodomy. After the arrest, the city closed the restrooms and backfilled the site. The police later made a training film of the footage. It was rereleased in 2007 as Tearoom. 1964 In October, US President Lyndon B. Johnson's aide Walter Jenkins was arrested in a YMCA in Washington, D.C., and the case was subsequently dismissed. 1968 Michael Turnbull was arrested in Hull for cottaging in a public toilet, before he became Bishop of Durham. 1975 In September 1975, actor Peter Wyngarde was arrested (under his real name, Cyril Louis Goldbert) in Gloucester bus station public toilets for gross indecency with Richard Jack Whalley (a truck driver). He was fined £75. 1976 Sixty-six-year-old retired U.S. Major General Edwin Walker made sexual advances to an undercover police officer in a public lavatory at a park in Dallas, Texas, on June 23, 1976, and was arrested for public lewdness. The general pleaded no contest and was fined $1,000 and court costs. 1976 Former Judge G. Harrold Carswell was convicted of battery for advances he made to an undercover police officer in a Tallahassee public lavatory.Joyce Murdoch, Deb Price, Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court (2002) p. 187. 1981 Coronation Street actor Peter Dudley was observed exposing himself to another man in a public toilet in Didsbury, and was charged with importuning. He pleaded guilty and was fined £200. Some months later, Dudley was charged again with gross indecency for an alleged similar offence, though this time he claimed he was not guilty and had been set up by the police. A Crown Court jury failed to reach a verdict, but while waiting for a retrial, Dudley suffered a series of strokes and heart attacks and died on 20 October 1983. 1984 The Labour MP Roger Thomas was convicted in Swansea of importuning for immoral purposes in a men's lavatory. He was fined £75.Julia Langdon and Paul Hoyland, 'Thomas may delay resignation to help Labour's poll chances', The Guardian, 5 March 1984, p. 2. Retrieved 15 January 2023. 1984 Actor Leonard Sachs was fined for importuning in a public toilet. 1988 Australian radio personality Alan Jones was arrested in a public lavatory block in London's West End and charged with two counts of outraging public decency by behaving in an indecent manner under the Westminster Bylaw. He was later cleared of all charges and awarded costs. 1990 British pop star Stedman Pearson (of the group Five Star) appeared at Kingston Magistrates Court in October 1990 and pleaded guilty to a charge of public indecency after being arrested in a public toilet in New Malden in London."We Are Family" (Documentary interview with 5 Star). BBC Television. (7 January 2003)Larkin, Colin (1998). The Virgin Encyclopedia of R&B and Soul, (p.121). Virgin Books/Muze Inc. London, England. Rees, Dafydd & Crampton, Luke (1991). Rock Movers and Shakers, p.172-173 (1991 Rev. Edition). ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, U.S. . 1998 In April 1998, pop star George Michael was arrested for "engaging in a lewd act" in a public toilet in Los Angeles after a sting operation by local police. Although he considered the arrest to be police entrapment, he pleaded "no contest" to the charge in court and was fined $810 and ordered to do 80 hours of community service. Later that year, Michael satire the events in his music video for the song "Outside" and was sued by one of the officers in the original arrest for portraying him as non-heterosexual and mocking him. The suit was ultimately dismissed."George Bust 'Bad Karma' Says U.S. Cop", Sunday Star, 5 March 2006 1998 In October 1998, Labour Party MP Ron Davies was mugged at knifepoint on Clapham Common. He resigned after it became clear he was engaging in homosexual activities in a known cottaging area. 2007 On 11 June 2007, Republican US Senator Larry Craig was arrested in the men's public toilet in the Lindbergh Terminal of the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport for allegedly soliciting sex. Craig later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and announced his intent to resign from his post as Republican senator from Idaho; ultimately, Craig's Lust. Slate, August 28, 2007 he did not resign. He contested his guilty plea, paid a fine, and served out his term; he did not run for re-election in 2008.
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