Cruising Stalls, Surfing Screens

Heterotopologies of a Water Closet

series of 4 drawings, photograph and essay \ 2018
published as “Cruising Stalls, Surfing Screens: Heterotopologies of a Water Closet,” Room Journal no.1, “Bathroom” (2019): 98-109.

A series of drawn investigations of a particular men’s bathroom which is a gay cruising space. Accompanying an essay, the drawings (re)construct a heterotopology of the water closet, mapping the ways in which four of its manifolds—the wall, the door, the mirror, and the screen—engender movements, relations, and (dis)continuities in space and time, and facilitate both physical and virtual interactions. The drawings take advantage of the underlying ambiguities of architectural axonometry. Offering an abstract, simultaneously omnipotent and neutral viewpoint, the oblique—notably, a historical connotation of the German ‘quer,’ and thus the possible etymological origin of the word queer—is folded back onto itself in order to re-present the out of the ordinary.