It was early August, 1982, and I was at a party. It must have been a fancy dress party, because I was chatting to a friend who was dressed as Indiana Jones. We were not chatting about the lost ark of the covenant, though, because he mentioned "Cottaging". I had never heard of cottaging before and asked him what it was. He explained it was a term used to describe homosexual encounters in a public convenience.
"What's so funny?" my friend asked.
"No, it's just something I was told when I was a teen... "
I recalled to him a discussion I had had with a school chum during which he had explained that "Queers like to do "it" in public conveniences".
"Well, he was right," my friend said.
My friend was an older man. He went on to describe, in unabashedly nostalgic terms, coming of age before 1967 (the year in which the UK government decriminalised homosexuality) where one of the few places men "like me" could meet was a public convenience. "Knowing the rozzers could turn up at any moment," he added jocularly, "added a certain frisson to proceedings." He concluded by telling me that there were still a few conveniences around where men met - and gave me the location of one beside a lay-by on an old B road just outside the city.
Over the next few days, I thought about our conversation a lot. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be intimate with another man knowing you were risking arrest - even imprisonment. I am by nature a promiscuous person. After losing my oral and anal virginity at university there followed a period of sexual activity that would have caused blushes among the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah. I wondered how I would have coped if every time I sucked a dick, or every time I was bum-fucked, a boy in blue might interrupt proceedings with "'Allo, 'allo, 'allo. What's going on here then?"
A few days later, a Thursday, mid-afternoon, I drove past the lay-by. It was about a hundred yards long and the convenience was a third of the way along. A squat red brick building with a flat concrete roof. I didn't think it would feature in any architectural magazine. I turned the car around, drove back, turned into the lay-by, and parked near the end. Then I wandered back toward the convenience.
The interior was surprisingly clean. Pale yellow tiles on the floor, pale green on the walls. Having used one of the three urinals, I washed my hands at one of the three wash basins. Then I turned my attention to the three cubicles. Opening the door to the middle one, my eyes were drawn immediately to the hole in the wall that separated the middle cubicle from the cubicle on the right. It was about waist high and about four inches in diameter. I knew what it was, of course - a gloryhole. It was the first time I had seen one.
At that time, I had a sexual fantasy involving a gloryhole - based on a story a university chum had recounted to me of a trip to the USA, during which he had spent an evening doing his bit for UK/USA relations in an adult bookstore. Listening to him tell of one cock after another appearing through a hole in the wall had given me a boner that a diamond-tipped drill wouldn't have been able to scratch. "I was in cock sucker's heaven," my university chum said, dreamily.
It was at that moment that I heard a car pull up outside. I entered the cubicle on the right and locked the door. Presently, someone came into the convenience. My heart started to race. After a minute or so, I heard a tap running. Then I heard a couple of paper towels being pulled from the dispenser. Then the man walked out.
And that was the highlight of the afternoon. I waited another ten or fifteen minutes, then went home.
That evening, I called my friend, and told him how I had spent the afternoon. He thought it was hilarious. "You went there mid-afternoon on a Thursday?"
