Art on Hammerschlag

The Queer Choir Toilet Stall

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Station 8 – a choir of queers, rewritten songs, photographer Rüdiger Trautsch

William E. Jones »Tearoom«

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The title of the film “Tearoom” by filmmaker William E. Jones plays on the term tearoom —which in slang refers to a place for quick sex.

In 1962, the police department of Mansfield, Ohio, shot an instructional video documenting their methods of prosecuting gay men. The door of a janitor’s closet in the public men’s restroom was fitted with a one-way mirror, allowing an officer to use a 16mm film camera to secretly monitor and film the men who met there for sex. The footage was subsequently used as evidence in court, resulting in all the accused men being found guilty and serving at least one year in prison. What is striking about the surviving recordings is that some faces have been burned out of the footage, rendering them unrecognizable. The artist suspects that these individuals may have been police officers who were covered by their colleagues. In 2008, William E. Jones released this educational film in its unedited form—as a radical example of using a film “as found”—thereby, on the one hand, making visible the police surveillance practices of the 1960s, while on the other hand highlighting the shift and, consequently, the mutability of the discourse over the past 50 years.

Felix Rexhausen's »Dienstlich Unterwegs«; (Männerschwarm)

Fri, 01 Jan 1982 00:00:00 +0000

In his anthology Die Märchenklappe, author Felix Rexhausen publishes the text “On Official Business,” in which he captures the thoughts of a fictional police officer assigned to observe homosexuals from the police box at Spielbudenplatz. In contrast to his disinterested colleague, he seems to have a voyeuristic curiosity about the “view of Pissburg” (p. 64): “It’s crazy boring here today. Sure, still better than running around outside in this weather or sitting in the patrol car. But otherwise, I kind of liked it better; I always enjoy coming here.” (p. 65)