In 1962, the police in the American city of Mansfield, Ohio set up a survelliance operation in a men’s restroom located below a city street. Installing a camera behind a restroom mirror, the police filmed the sexual activities of the men who visited the facility.

The resulting series of 16mm films were used in court to prosecute at least 38 of the men filmed and to make a short instructional movie

The resulting edited and voice-overed police film is an horrific indictment of the sexual attitudes of the time. Connections between the murder of children, pedophilia and same-sex acts between adults are quickly made. The relentless voice-over condemns each of the men in turn: ‘Sex-deviancy’, ‘perverts’… Their prison sentences are related in gloating terms. There is no doubt in the narration. There is contempt for any hint of leniancy or possible law-changes.

It is a world of sexual hysteria translated into a survelliance society.

The movie also documents a straight-laced America of button-up shirts, horn-rimmed glasses and ubiquitous cigarettes where fleeting moments of sexual expression can be experienced in hidden places but within a context of fear. Even during the sex-acts, the eyes of these men are often focused on the restroom doors and the possibility of an intrusion that could mean arrest and imprisonment. There is an urgency of need for contact that overcomes the weight of law and self but cannot quite overcome the awareness of possible consequences.

There is also a poignancy as each of the men is observed - smoking, washing hands, straightening attire in a mirror, involved in brief sexual contact, wiping semen from the floor - because, for them, these moments mark their last instants of freedom from restraint by the state or confinement in a treatment facility.

Each of the men filmed was found guilty under the State of Ohio’s sodomy law and sentenced to between one and twenty years imprisonment or confinment in a State Hospital as a ‘psycopath’. The film is a litany of destroyed lives, families and careers.

It is a dehumanised America in which you wouldn’t want to live. It is an indictment of attitudes that make a mockery of the concept of the ‘land of the free’. It is a glimpse of lives lived in circumstances with an uncanny similarity to Stalinist Russia. In every move, in every flicker of the eyes, it is possible to see the terrible consequences of a sexual attitude as it marks a human existence.

Filmmaker William E. Jones has acessed the original Mansfield police footage now archived at the Kinsey Institute and, in 2007, released a movie entitled Tearoom.