Rest stop confidential
Across America, countless men are meeting up for sex in highway bathrooms. I'm one of them. Here's why
By Conner Habib
I was 15 the first time I found out that men have sex in public. On the way to Maine with my mom and stepfather, we pulled off the highway and into a rest area. At the urinal, there was a man next to me. He was tall and homely, and holding himself. He stared at me. I was electrified, but held to that spot; he shook himself at me and I couldn’t move. We would have stayed there forever, but another man came in and saw what was happening and scowled. Time started again and I ran out of the bathroom.
If you’ve ever pulled over to a rest area, you’ve been near men having sex. I’m one of those men, I’ve done it a hundred times; we go into the woods or a truck with tinted windows, in a stall under cold light. It never stops, not for season or time. In the winter, men trudge through snow to be with each other, in the summer, men leave the woods with ticks clinging to their legs. Have you ever stopped at a rest area and found it completely empty? There’s always one man there, in his car, waiting to meet someone new.
This has been going on for a long, long time. The new ways that men meet — endlessly staring into phones, searching on hookup apps like Grindr or sites like Manhunt — haven’t changed the fact that we’re still having sex at rest areas, because they offer something different. For the man who is unsure of his sexuality, or unsure of how to tell others about it, for the man who has a family but feels new desires (or old, hidden ones) unfolding inside of him, the website and the phone apps are just too certain of themselves. They’re for gay men who want to have gay sex. Sex at the rest area, instead, abolishes identity; there’s a sort of freedom there to not be anything – instead, men just meet other men there; men who want the same sort of freedom.
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I added this nice relevant comment which was unfortunately deleted by the comment moderation Nazis at Salon:
Several years ago I was driving to Las Vegas and stopped at a rest stop in the Reno, NV area to relieve myself. As I was using a urinal I noticed that some weirdo was standing near the urinal on the opposite end of where I was standing and was staring at me pee. He quickly looked away when he saw me notice him and I stepped in closer to the urinal. After I finished and flushed the urinal, he started clapping and congratulated me on "taking a tremendous piss." I was really freaked out, so I quickly got my hands wet at the sink but didn't use soap and hustled out of there to my car and continued toward Vegas. Needless to say, it was an unpleasant experience. I'll never forget this experience because that weirdo looked a lot like the guy who played Screech on Saved By The Bell.
