Gay cruising game The Tearoom conveys the perils – both historical and frighteningly current – of not being ‘proper’

Developer Robert Yang’s latest title gamifies the risk-ridden process of cruising public toilets for anonymous sex, replacing penises with flesh-coloured firearms to both sidestep a Twitch ban and pick holes in US gun culture

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In The Tearoom, the player’s goal is to engage in sexual acts with other men – though not every character comes to the bathroom with the same motives.

Published: 7:33am, 14 Jul 2017Updated: 7:33am, 14 Jul 2017

In 1962, police in Mansfield, Ohio police set up hidden cameras in a public bathroom to record consensual sexual activity between men. An artist named William E. Jones, who was born in Ohio that same year, later found the footage online. He edited out a voiceover that he described as “as illiterate and hateful a text as I have ever heard committed to film”, and released the result in 2007 as a “found footage” documentary called Tearoom (US slang for a public bathroom in which men meet to have anonymous sex).

The footage reveals that the men involved were diverse in appearance – and presumably background – but all were wary. And with good reason: many of them were later arrested. Public bathrooms have long been a battlefield where LGBT people are targeted by the law.

Recently released video game The Tearoom is about the experience portrayed in Jones’ documentary: cruising public toilets for anonymous sex. It was created by Robert Yang, an indie game developer and artist who has released a number of short, often funny games about gay sex and culture. These include Cobra Club, an explicit-picture simulator; Hurt Me Plenty, which explores consent and BDSM; and Succulent, which was inspired by “homo hop” music videos.

Icons indicate whether it is appropriate to look towards a man at another urinal; if the object of your gaze is interested, the correct eye contact causes a bar to fill

The player’s goal is to engage in sexual acts with other men – but before that, you must wait for someone to enter the bathroom, and then engage in a ritual that involves repeated periods of prolonged eye contact, all the while keeping a look out for the police.

“A lot of it is based on this sociological study by Laud Humphreys called ‘Tearoom Trade’,” Yang says. “[He] actually calls it a game, and tries to write out what the rules are and stuff, so it’s almost like a game design document. A lot of it is eye contact, so they’ll be peeing and then they might look at you and then you look at them, and then you look away and then they look away … stuff like that.”