Tulsa flushed

Deconstructing the shit show

I have a theory: the bathroom captures the spirit of an establishment, that intangible quality that transforms a space into a place, an aesthetic that proves a distinct ideology. 

These strange chambers of shame and abjection are filled with fluids and other opaque matter. Piss, vomit, excrement, blood, sweat, semen, booze, powders, smoke. There’s a sticky fog in these weird closets we go into when we want to do something we’re embarrassed about. Whether there’s something inside us that needs to be flushed or something of which we’d liked to be stuffed—bathrooms are the places for that to happen.

In Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination, author Sheila L. Cavanagh notes that public bathrooms “accumulate waste, not only excrement and offal, but the cast-off and outmoded remains of things, places, people, techniques, and ideas for which physical and conceptual space no longer exists in the world above.” 

A good bathroom, the kind I’m after, should sparkle incandescent under a black light, and also tell a story. 

Bathroom graffiti more or less functions like a pre-Internet Reddit or Tumblr. It’s harmless, low-cost deviance. It’s the one place in real life where anyone can anonymously make their mark or identify their presence before a captured and diverse audience. Objectively, I’m not sure there is a bathroom with the “best” graffiti. But, Soundpony is probably many Tulsans’ darling.

Soundpony doesn’t go out of its way to outwardly designate the ladies’ room from the mens’ room, though it becomes apparent once you’re through the door: one bathroom has urinals, the other has mirrors. There’s something special inside both: an ephemeral narrative that is constantly being written by everyone who stumbles inside with a Sharpie or a sticker. Every so often, they’ll cover it all up and start over.

Fassler Hall also has some real gems of wisdom. One that is especially poignant: “The only villain in a Goofy movie is the distance between father and son.” Caz’s bathroom graffiti—though less insightful—is more interactive. Once I spent half an hour calling the numbers scrawled in the ladies’ room. 

“Hello? Hi. Yeah, it said to call ‘for a good time,’ so... you tell me.” 

Turns out, that’s one way to find meth in Tulsa.

Fun Fact: Alfred Kinsey did an analysis of latrinalia (a fancy word for bathroom graffiti) in the 1950s that suggested men tend to make more aggressive and sexual statements while women scrawl more conversationally.

At Cain’s Ballroom, there’s a plaque to remind you that you’re pissing on hallowed ground. This proof of historical significance discourages graffiti, and the stalls, which kind of feel like livestock containers, are painted black to quickly and easily cover any scribbles or scratches. It feels overly sterile, which oddly magnifies the lived-in griminess of the place. 

Chimera has two single-occupancy bathrooms that both picture a gender-neutral character from Saturday Night Live. Inside either one, you’ll find information on community events and advertisements for all kinds of wonderful miscellany, like a call for flautists. Chimera’s bathrooms, like its menu, have a mindfully curated minimalism.

The public restroom at Pie Hole is unisex and is adorned with quirky messages and pithy statements. Both bathrooms at Yellow Brick Road are unisex, neither have urinals, and both have signage with information about STD testing. The Majestic’s facilities, though labeled, are very loosely gendered, and if you’re brave enough to actually sit on the toilet, you can feel bass from the dance music past the hallway reverberating through the bog.

A slew of articles and essays in the last several months have made the case for or against gender-neutral facilities. In some states, it’s illegal—and punishable by hefty fines and/or jail time—for people to use public bathrooms that don’t align with the chromosomes with which they were born, regardless of how they identify in the present. 

According to Cavanagh, the mechanisms of public bathrooms stink of something Freudian: urinals represent the vagina and seats the anus. “The toilet, like the unconscious, is a dumping ground for unacceptable impulses, sexual practices, identifications, and desires.” Incidentally, activities that occur in bathroom stalls are perceived as dirty.

The historical tradition of homosexual sex in public bath houses pre-dates... just about everything. There’s latrinalia preserved in Pompeii that translates to: “Weep, you girls. My penis has given up on you. Now it penetrates men’s behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!” A very, very small survey concluded the best bathrooms to cruise in Tulsa are at Woodland Hills Mall and the River Parks.

SWIM enjoys a recreational trip to the bathroom as much as the next discrete twenty-something. And that someone who isn’t me prefers single-occupancy bathrooms with good latch-bolt locks. Like at DoubleShot.