Back in India where it's very crowded and there are very few toilets, except in middle class cafes and hotels, I was busting in Varanasi, the sacred city on the Ganges.
Busting walking back from the Sacred Ghats on the River, I saw a public urinal.
There it was by the side of a street crowded with pilgrims, just as you approached the Ghats . . a urinal up against the wall. I stepped up and grinning with the liberation of it all peed like they did, in affect onto the wall the piss flowing back onto the hot footpath, to dry and merge with the accumulated smell of a whole dry seasons worth of dusty mens' piss. I really needed to go but couldn't believe I was doing it in a crowded public street in mid morning sunlight near such a sacred place. Think Catholic Christmas procession near Cathedral entrance or by the queues waiting to get into St Peters in Rome!
Just pulled up the leg of my shorts, dragged it out, silently giggling and splashed the wall. Avoiding splashing my bare legs and thongs. Stepping aside as it flowed back past me towards the gutter, soaking in and drying before it reached that far.
They have no choice but turn away and discreetly pee, often squatting if they are wearing a dhoti (waist wrap) I pity the women though, never saw them doing it although I would have given them more privacy if I had, but the environment is stacked against them. women even do the roadwork. Out there in the hot dry air spiced with about nine hot months of dried mens' urine and more! Then the monsoons come to wash it all away!
ten years later, looking back, it was almost as much fun as being pissed at the Sydney Mardi Gras....that's where we saw the Urinal Man.....lying there in the trough.....well tanned, and splashed in his wet white briefs.....
Tsk! the things we remember and discuss on this site! and in context, I suppose I should mention that I spent years avoiding public toilets at school after the 7 yearolds attacked and bullied me as a 5 year old alone in the school outdoor toilets, don't know what they did to me (blocked it out?) but I didn't like toilets after that. They grew up to be my seniors in Cubs and Scouts....
And now as a Gay, I consider public toilets to be our "Sacred Sites", our altars to love and pagan celebration of masculinity and male sexuality, where "we" have met for well over a century. And now here, there's a rightwing agenda, a definite policy of closing them down. Even filling the underground Victorian ones in or bulldozing the ones above ground, wiping out our Sacred Sites, deliberately. Rather sad. Enough said.
