Yes, that was me and my mate Tom a couple of Mondays ago falling in and out of a succession of bars in London’s Soho. We were doing research. And what we found shocked us. Bog after bog has been redecorated with wipe-clean surfaces!
You know what this means, don’t you? The end of toilet graffiti. Over in the USA, the news is the same. On a toilet graffiti website (yes, there are such things) there’s a worrying report from a public loo in Wagner’s Mall, Bend, Oregon, where someone had written, “I need a blow job.”
Underneath that, someone else had replied, “No, you need Jesus.” To which a third person had added, “No, I need Jesus to give me a blow job.” According to the report, “All hell broke out for weeks between warring factions in this particular bathroom shared by gays and Jesus freaks alike. Finally management stepped in and had the bathroom walls re-done with a material, some kind of bumpy stuff, that made graffiti writing almost impossible.”
If the powers that be have decreed that we can no longer deface walls, this is a sad day. The practice is almost literally as old as the hills and even Lord Byron did it. (He carved his name (rather beautifully; I’ve seen it) on the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion near Athens). Not only has it given us toilet humour, it’s given us wise thoughts and exciting art. And in the days before Grindr, it provided an important gay messaging service. Mind you, has anyone actually pulled a guy as a result of leaving a phone number on a toilet wall? Well, we’ll find out later.
IN A PUBLIC TOILET IN OREGON, SOMEONE HAD WRITTEN “I NEED A BLOW JOB.” UNDERNEATH THAT, SOMEONE ELSE HAD REPLIED, “NO, YOU NEED JESUS.” TO WHICH A THIRD PERSON HAD ADDED, “NO, I NEED JESUS TO GIVE ME A BLOW JOB.”
But first things first. What is graffiti? Is it rock paintings from 50,000 BC? Is the inscription, “Here Krimon fucked his boy, Bathykles’ brother”, carved on a rock on the island of Thera around 600 BC, the world’s first gay graffiti?
The answer’s officially no in both cases. The word “graffiti”, which comes from “graffiato”, the past participle of “graffiare” (to scratch) was coined only in 1853 by Italian Raffaele Garrucci to describe around 1,600 inscriptions found during the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
For the first time we had a word to describe unofficial, amateur, casual wall writing. Ever since then historians have loved graffiti. As opposed to the work of official scribes, who were told by their masters what to write, graffiti provides an alternative history that tells us so much more about ordinary people like us.
The graffiti written before Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD proves that we haven’t changed a bit in two thousand years. There’s lots of gay stuff, too much to record here. The most timeless? “Secundus likes to screw boys.” The most bitchy? “Amplicatus, I know that Icarus is buggering you. Salvius wrote this.” The most beautiful? “Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!”
Somehow the millennia fall away and we can picture the gay men who wrote these words. And although the messages are vulgar, they reveal fascinating information about levels of literacy. (Just like today, some writers made grammatical errors). If graffiti disappears, what will the people two thousand years from now make of us?
In 1966 Alan Dundes invented the word “latrinalia” specifically to describe toilet graffiti. He taught folklore at the University of California, Berkeley, and realised that the tradition is an important folk art. It’s survived for as long as it has because it pleases all concerned. Graffiti artists like to write or draw outrageous, libellous or shocking things that they would never be allowed to print.
The rest of us like to be surprised or shocked or amused when we’re forced to do something as mundane as having a crap. Toilet art can really make you look twice. The “Gay Kama Sutra” pictures shown here are part of a long series drawn in a bar in Kreuzberg, Berlin.
But what we’ve always loved best of all are the jokes. Some of them are very old indeed and turn up in different countries, in different languages, all over the world, proof of an international communication that has nothing to do with modern technology. One which is still quoted seems to date from the dark days when homosexuality was an illness and a crime. Someone wrote, “My mother made me a homosexual”.
The famous retort, written by someone else, was, “If I gave her the wool, would she make me one too?” A more recent one, found in the Soho pub The French House, is, “Prince is living proof that Liberace fucked Little Richard.” My favourite? It’s always found at the bottom of a cubicle partition, next to the small gap left above the floor. It reads, “Beware of gay limbo dancers.”
As Tom and I staggered from bar to bar, shielding our eyes from yet another gleaming, virgin, stainless steel wall, we began to wonder if toilet graffiti might already be dead. But then at last I discovered some delightfully retro cubicles absolutely plastered in Magic Marker poetry and art.
There were some anatomical drawings, a libellous statement about G-A-Y supremo Jeremy Joseph, and a lot of phone numbers. Have you ever rung one? Up until now I haven’t. I was put off by one joker, who revealed on another graffiti website, “I often write my mates’ numbers down in toilets (I’m straight) to see if anyone rings them for sex. It’s funny when this happens.” Yeah, I can imagine.
Now, however, duty called and I decided to pick up the phone. What do you know? A lot of dialling and no joy. “The number you have dialled has not been recognised.” “Sorry, the mobile phone you are calling has not responded. Please try again shortly.”
And so on. But then “Toby, 19, I’m easy” rang me back! Actually he’sToby and he’s 19. But he’s not easy. He says he didn’t write the message. “All I can think of”, he says, “is that my ex-partner wrote it.” Is Toby going to have it out with him? “No”, he replies. “I’d rather leave it.”
Toby also claimed that I was the first person to call him. Always a hit-and-miss affair, this method of hooking up with complete strangers may be gasping its last. Let’s face it, how could it possibly survive when you’ve got a much more efficient dating service right there in your pocket? Listen, it’s vibrating right now!
Similarly, why should you write something witty on a toilet wall that people might never read? You can post your joke on Facebook and within seconds you’ll get response. “OMG! That is sooooooooo funny!!!!” But do we all want to surrender to the kind of social networking where everything is monitored and logged and may be used against us?
Toilets offer much more exciting possibilities to the secretly subversive, to those who want to remain anonymous, to the philosopher who wants to spread his ideas through the grass roots. Best of all toilet graffiti shows two fingers to authority. That’s symbolised best in this celebrated couplet: “The painter’s work was all in vain,/The shithouse poet strikes again.”