Bathroom sex back on campus
SMU is once again gaining a reputation as a hot spot for anonymous sexual encounters in building bathrooms.
According to recent police reports, a custodian found two men having sexual intercourse in the second floor bathroom of the Fondren Science building on Sept. 12. An officer later found a five-inch hole between the last two stalls that the men allegedly used. Both of the men were not affiliated with the university.
The hole, also known as a “glory hole,” is used in unusual homosexual practices between men who wish to remain anonymous to one another. Typically, the holes are small fist-sized openings cut between private stalls at waist level. One man puts his genitals through the hole, while another man in the next stall on the other side of the hole performs a variety of sexual activities including oral sex.
This is not the first time SMU has been a center for “glory hole” activity. The Daily Campus first reported on the Fondren Science hole in 1998.
“SMU police have received several reports over the last few years from different individuals about suspicious behavior occurring in men’s bathrooms – not only in Fondren Science building, but in the Fondren Library and Hughes-Trigg Student Center,” said Capt. Mike Snellgrove of the SMU Police Department.
Early in 1998, many similar cases of the same nature were reported in the bathrooms of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center and especially the Fondren Science Building.
However, according to Snellgrove, this activity extends back to when the economics department occupied Fondren Library.
In 1998, a Web site ranked SMU as one of the top “tea rooms,” or toilet areas friendly to glory hole activity, in Dallas. Several groups of unaffiliated men were caught by Digital Commons staff in the library’s basement.
But on Sept. 17, 2002, police once again discovered two different men engaging in sexual activity in the third floor bathroom of Fondren Science Building. This time, the men were found standing inside separate stalls, each facing one another with their pants down to the floor. One of the men was a student and was referred to the judicial officer. The other was not affiliated and received a criminal trespass warning. Officers discovered another hole cut between the stalls at waist level.
Bob Casagrande, director of Campus Planning and Plants Operations, said they will be replacing the partition in the bathrooms with a thick metal sheet bonded with a half-inch thick plastic sheet on either side to prevent this from happening again.
The measures taken by the police in these situations depend on what the responding officer actually observes, Snellgrove said. In the past two instances, officers did not personally observe the sexual activity. As a result, the police cannot press charges.
Had the officer seen the men in the act, the two men would have been arrested for participating in sexual activity in a public restroom, which is classified as a class A misdemeanor.
