Sex para­noia, gov­er­ment con­trol and witch-hunt at its finest. Tea­room con­sists of footage shot by the police in the course of a crack­down on pub­lic sex in the Amer­i­can Mid­west. In the sum­mer of 1962, the Mans­field, Ohio Police Depart­ment pho­tographed men in a restroom under the main square of the city. The cam­era­men hid in a closet and watched the clan­des­tine activ­i­ties through a two-way mirror.

The film they shot was used in court as evi­dence against the defen­dants, all of whom were found guilty of sodomy, which at that time car­ried a manda­tory min­i­mum sen­tence of one year in the state pen­i­ten­tiary. The orig­i­nal sur­veil­lance footage shot by the police came into the pos­ses­sion of direc­tor William E. Jones while he was research­ing this case for a doc­u­men­tary project.

The unedited scenes of ordi­nary men of var­i­ous races and classes meet­ing to have sex were so pow­er­ful that the direc­tor decided to present the footage with a min­i­mum of inter­ven­tion. Tea­room is a rad­i­cal exam­ple of film pre­sented “as found” for the pur­pose of cir­cu­lat­ing his­tor­i­cal images that have oth­er­wise been suppressed.

This is an excerpt  from the orig­i­nal film (16mm film trans­ferred to video, color, silent, 56 min­utes, 1962/2007).