Last week, an interesting new computer game was released. It's about being gay and looking for gay sex. More specifically, it's about being gay in the 60s and looking for sex in a public restroom (a tearoom) ... and the aim is to not get caught doing it.

 

Robert Yang created The Tearoom as a reminder about the struggles many gay men faced in the not too distant past. His game is set in a small roadside bathroom in Mansfield, Ohio. In 1962, in the real life version of the town, 38 men were arrested and charged with sodomy for having sex in public washroom. 

 

“The Mansfield police had to figure out how to jail people for having 'public sex' that wasn’t actually in public view,” Yang explained. “To make this invisible subtext visible, the Mansfield police secretly recorded the public bathroom for 2 months and basically made one of the first full-color gay porn films in history.”

 

Don't expect to see any cocks in the game, though; Yang was forced to equip men with guns between their legs as a way to get around censors who can't handle the site of actual genitals. In the game you are expected to take a flaccid gun and get it hard -- and filled with bullets -- before it's ready to shoot.

 

 

"[I]n video game land, I still have to deal with Twitch banning my gay games by secret trial as if they're the fucking game police," Yang said. "So to appease this oppressive conservative gamer-surveillance complex, I have swapped out any pesky penises in my game for the only thing that the game industry will never moderate nor ban -- guns. Now, there's nothing wrong with guys appreciating other guys' guns, right?"

 

The game is free to download, but you are encouraged to pay what you can.