Situated in the middle of a Mansfield, Ohio, street in 1962 was a public restroom with the aura of a prison. Submerged beneath the sidewalk, the small cellar had dreary gray brick walls, a pair of stalls with no doors, a row of five full-length urinals — and covertly, a heavy law enforcement presence.

In actuality, it was more of a holding cell, since many of the men who frequented the restroom “all had one thing in common,” according to Mansfield Police Chief John P. Butler: “They were all going to jail.”

The imprisoning essence of the Mansfield restroom goes beyond aesthetics. It was a place that welcomed arrested souls, where men who had sex with men — not many of them were called “gay” back then — fled for reprieve from a smothering world.

“The restroom where they met was literally, and in a more general sense, underground,” says William E. Jones, a gay filmmaker who chronicles the Mansfield restroom in “Tearoom,” a documentary comprised exclusively of footage collected during an extended undercover police raid of the facility in 1962.

Jones comes to Atlanta for a Feb. 22 showing of “Tearoom” at eyedrum gallery.

 “What the men did there was not sanctioned by the city above, but this space permitted them to act on their desires,” Jones says.

The hour-long movie transports viewers back to the bustle of the “Tearoom trade” — a circuit of public spots popularly known as places where men could hookup. A transfixing silence serves as the film’s only soundtrack, part of the unfiltered, undistracted view audiences get from the time the police department installs a two-way mirror to catch a stream of hurried, forbidden rendezvous.

Jones explains his decision not to add any sound, commentary or unrelated footage to his film.

“It took me quite a while to realize that there was almost nothing my intervention could do to improve it,” he says. “I used it, essentially, as found.”

THE CAST OF REGULARS who frequent the Mansfield tearoom reveals the remarkably egalitarian nature of the busy meeting spot, considering the racially charged times. White men of every age, class and body type — some of whom might otherwise be hostile to the rise of Negro rights outside the tearoom — are willing to masturbate with professional black men, or pay a young black hustler for a blow job.

Whatever their differences in the streets above the restroom, together the men found a bunker where they could explore the urges they hated and fought against for decades, a place where even society and sometimes, their own self-loathing could not overwhelm their truest desires.

“These acts had a utopian aspect, provoking people in power to close the place down and punish the participants,” Jones says. “The way that sex makes the mixing of various ages, races and classes possible — and that ordinary men availed themselves of the opportunity to explore this — shocked Mansfield’s city fathers, and the policemen who were their servants.”

Despite the relative diversity in the Mansfield restroom, there is much about

“Tearoom” that captures the conservatism of 1960s America. The films features a ubiquitous flow of starched white dress shirts, black ties, square-framed glasses, and cigarettes being puffed on as men exit the restroom and return to their camouflaged lives.

There are also some deliciously explicit scenes that are simultaneously stimulating and deflating. It’s the most graphic parts of the movie that are the most disheartening. They capture the extent of the dehumanization gay people endured during that era.

The empty sex itself isn’t most dehumanizing, but rather the culmination of the fear and desperation the men lived in as they tried to reconcile their conflicted desires.

Fear is in the eye of nearly every man who walks into the Mansfield tearoom. During sex, most of the eyes are concentrated on the bathroom’s front door, the men visibly terrified of what it would mean to themselves, their families, their jobs, their marriages, even their status among the living, if they saw feet or shadows approaching the entryway.
When the Mansfield Police Department finished its lengthy surveillance of the underground tearoom, about 60 men were arrested and prosecuted under Ohio’s sodomy law.

AN OHIO NATIVE, JONES LEARNED ABOUT police footage of the Mansfield bust first in a “truly awful” police training video about camera surveillance, then in the movie “Hell’s Highway” by Atlanta filmmaker Bret Wood. The original footage now resides at the Kinsey Institute for Research of Sex, Gender & Reproduction, and serves as visual evidence of how much gay life in America blossomed during the last half of the 20th century.

“What younger people often fail to understand is that in 1962, the very notion of being gay was simply not considered a topic worthy of public discussion in most parts of the U.S.” says Jones, who is also releasing a book entitled “Tearoom.”

“There has been an enormous, irreversible change in consciousness within the period of a single person’s lifetime,” he adds. “The present debates, as unappetizing and frustrating as they can be, are a definite political advance over the erasure and silence of the past.”

For all of the internal pain the men in “Tearoom” apparently suffered, the raw footage also captures the euphoria, however fleeting, some men were able to experience before the gay rights movement began in earnest.

“When I presented ‘Tearoom’ in San Francisco, many of the people in the audience were gay seniors,” Jones says. “I expected them to be quite critical, but I got the impression that they were glad to see images that reminded them of the early 1960s.

“After the first showing, a sweet old man regaled me with tales of his own tearoom experiences, including one involving sheriff’s officers in the basement of a Midwestern county courthouse,” he says.

The issue of public sex dominated news headlines just before the release of “Tearoom,” following the arrest and guilty plea of U.S. Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) last summer. As much as he’s asked for his opinion on the Craig situation, Jones says he wishes he could come up with a witty response, “but really, it’s all too sad and grotesque for me to crack a joke about.”

Asked his thoughts on why some men continue to cruise public restrooms in more liberated times, Jones suspects it’s a similar, primal motivation that inspired the men of the Mansfield tearoom.
“There are many men who feel that some pleasures are worth grasping, in and of themselves, just for the hell of it, regardless of the risk,” Jones says.