A Hole with a Much Longer History

The glory hole is a deceptively simple device: a hole made in a partition separating two people, allowing sexual contact while preserving a degree of physical separation and, often, anonymity. Precisely because it is so simple, it has no identifiable inventor and no documented place of origin. Its history belongs less to the history of inventions than to the history of sexual practices and of the spaces in which they became possible. The expression glory hole itself is misleading when looking backwards. It existed in English by the 18th century, but with entirely different meanings, including a small room, cupboard or untidy storage space. Its sexual meaning appears much later, documented in American homosexual slang by 1949.¹ The practice, however, is demonstrably much older.

It is tempting to begin in Antiquity. Roman baths and latrines provided environments in which nudity and bodily functions were far less secluded than they would become in later European societies. Yet there is an important architectural problem with imagining an ancient glory hole: many Roman public latrines consisted of rows of seats without permanent partitions between users. The very thing that makes a glory hole possible, a wall separating two individuals, was therefore often absent. No known Roman text, object or archaeological installation securely documents a hole in a partition used for sexual contact. Even the famously erotic paintings of Pompeii's Suburban Baths tell us about the presence of sexual imagery in a bathing environment, not about glory holes.

There is nevertheless an intriguing Roman antecedent, although it belongs more properly to the history of voyeurism. In the House of the Centenary at Pompeii, room 43 contained erotic paintings and an unusually positioned small opening that could apparently be closed. John Pollini has proposed that it allowed someone to observe sexual activity taking place inside the room, perhaps by climbing onto a stool. The interpretation remains disputed, and other scholars have rejected the more adventurous reconstruction of the room as a private camera d'amore. What Pompeii offers us, then, is not an ancient glory hole but something subtler: a possible example of architecture being deliberately manipulated so that a wall could conceal bodies while an opening allowed erotic access to what lay on the other side.²

The evidence becomes dramatically clearer in London in 1707. During the proceedings against Thomas Vaughan and Thomas Davis for conspiracy and extortion, Mr Guillam described entering the Temple Bog-House and finding himself beside a remarkably enterprising neighbour. In the wonderfully restrained language of the record, “a Boy in the adjoyning Vault put his Privy-member through a Hole.”³ Guillam was surprised and withdrew, while the other man called after him with a further invitation. Whatever name contemporaries gave such an arrangement, all the essential elements of the later glory hole were already present: neighbouring compartments, a partition, a hole through it, the deliberate presentation of a sexual organ through the opening and the possibility of an encounter in which the partition limited the participants' exposure to one another.

This 1707 episode is particularly valuable because it appears almost accidentally in the historical record. The hole itself was not the subject of the prosecution. Vaughan and Davis were accused of participating in a scheme that used accusations of sodomy to extort money from men. Guillam was a victim and witness, not someone prosecuted for what happened in the latrines. His brief description survives because it formed part of the circumstances surrounding the attempted blackmail. The simplicity of the device also makes it perfectly reasonable to suspect that 1707 was not its beginning. A hole through a wooden partition required neither specialized equipment nor technological innovation. Earlier examples may simply have left no documentary trace.

A curious French legal case from 1857 provides a different kind of intermediate chapter. Young men engaged in what the courts called acts of libertinage inside a closed room were convicted of outrage public à la pudeur because an observer had been able to watch them through the keyhole. This was not a glory hole: the opening had not been made for sexual contact and was used only by a voyeur. Its significance lies elsewhere. It demonstrates how much could depend legally upon a tiny opening in a wall. An activity performed behind a closed door could nevertheless become “public” because it remained visible through a keyhole.⁴

By the 1860s and 1870s, Paris provides something much closer to an established culture of glory holes rather than the isolated glimpse preserved in the London proceedings. Public urinals had become important meeting places for men seeking other men. A police report from 1862 concerning a public convenience near the Pont de la Concorde records an opening in a partition that had been stopped with plaster and cement. Other reports reveal that the phenomenon was anything but easily suppressed.

At Les Halles the contest between users and authorities became almost absurdly persistent. François Carlier, a former senior Paris police official, later described how the men whom contemporary authorities called pédérastes bored “petits trous” through the partitions separating the individual compartments, allowing neighbours to commit what he termed outrages à la pudeur through the wall. Municipal workmen filled the holes during the day. They were opened again at night. The authorities eventually replaced the wooden partitions with iron plates. Even these were reportedly pierced, and the facilities ultimately had to be closed.⁵ Similar urinals and public conveniences associated with male sexual encounters could be found around Les Halles, railway stations, Montmartre and other busy parts of Paris.

The architecture helps explain their usefulness. Two men could occupy neighbouring compartments without standing openly together. The wall concealed much of each participant while the opening provided a point of contact. In places subjected to police observation, this arrangement offered discretion, partial anonymity and some protection from immediate visual exposure. It is tempting to describe this as a deliberate strategy for defeating the police, but the surviving evidence does not allow us to go quite that far. What can be said is that users repeatedly adapted the architecture around them and that municipal authorities repeatedly attempted to undo those adaptations.