This Glory Hole Is Not For Sale
On Troye Sivan, the privatization of public sex, and the queer art Megami wants us to protect.
Author’s note: This is a heretofore unpublished piece, written in the fall of 2023 and edited (slightly) for clarity. It contains naughty words and critiques with which I’m no longer sure I agree. Whatever.
Glory be to the glory hole. Linn Tonstad, professor of queer theological studies (yes, you read that right) at the Yale Divinity School, has likened the glory hole, this impressive feat of pent-up engineering, to the Christian concepts of unconditional love and oblation. After all, how much more blind faith is required of wholeheartedly devoting oneself to an amorphous God compared to the act of getting down on one's knees and, ahem, exalting whatever anonymous figure pokes through from the other side of the partition?
Tonstad’s is a cheeky comparison, but it’s worth noting that the obvious difference here has to do with pleasure, both its reception and administration. Sure, there is a type of soul-affirming catharsis to be had in prayer, but (barring any easy, perhaps dark, jokes around the subject) sexual relief is not something to be found in church. Meanwhile, certain men suck cock because it feels good to make someone else feel good. And for generations, this reality has been largely frowned upon, forcing such interactions to take place incognito—in clandestine quarters and unspoken languages, private public places and public private places. Heteronormativity has erected a wall that separates the bodies of men from one another, but when you slice a hole out of this wall, about waist level, you allow something transgressive, something glorious to occur. You create a means for gratification, gluttony, steamy contravention. You create a means for liberation.
Perhaps this notion, that the glory hole carries with it a gay-old gallimaufry of connotations with different weights and histories and tones and ambiguities, is what makes it perfect fodder for artistic, and therefore commercial, reproduction by one of this generation’s most recognizable gay figures. The Australian pop singer Troye Sivan’s single “Rush”—a sultry and exquisitely brash, if a bit cursory, dance floor hit—placed a stranglehold on DJ setlists at Hell’s Kitchen gay clubs and Fire Island pool parties when it was released summer 2023. In a scene from the song’s appropriately saucy accompanying music video, Sivan peeks through a grimy glory hole right into the camera, an image that was later reproduced for the single’s 7” vinyl “Exclusive & Limited Glory Edition.” It’s fun and cool and kind of totally harmless. And I have a major problem with it.
It is unclear whether (i.e. it is unlikely that) Sivan is familiar with Dr. Tonstad’s theory. What is clear is that by slapping the glory hole onto his record cover and selling it to his wide breadth of queer and straight fans alike (for $15.99, plus shipping), Sivan is shining a black light on the glory hole and all it represents, especially within its history in pop music. And what it illuminates might not all be pretty.
The “Rush” artwork itself maintains a clever enough conceit. Predominantly cast in a neon, A24 film-coded teal shade, the cover is perforated by a perfectly circular crater—bordered by strips of haphazard duct tape, naturally—in the paper. Centered within the hole is Sivan, his eyes cast downward and lips parted ever so slightly, printed on the marrow of the physical record. It’s witty, it’s erotic, it’s, dare I say, cool. The imagery immediately spurs a sort of gleeful, if-you-know-you-know reaction from its intended audience. Sivan could have just as easily etched in the skin “this one’s for the homosexuals,” and it would have retained only marginally less nuance. The whole thing is also such a simple play on the vinyl format that it’s almost surprising the schtick hasn’t been done before. But then again, who could’ve done it before, and when?
Something has shifted culturally, politically, you name it, that has allowed Sivan to adopt such iconography at such a moment in history—and the connoisseurs of pop music to welcome such an artistic choice. Sivan’s journey from, as he would call it, “alt-bedroom-sadboy-gay-pop” to the lascivious, propulsive textures of “Rush” stems from both personal growth and industry-wide shakeups. In the eight years since his starry-eyed breakthrough record Blue Neighbourhood, Sivan has flirted with love and heartbreak, sexual ecstasy and gender euphoria, partying hard and staying in harder. No longer is he crooning brooding ballads about closeted crushes or crises of faith; on Something To Give Each Other (his latest LP, which features “Rush”), he directly invokes Britney via drag in one music video and belts about turning his “bussy” out. As he told The Guardian, his courage to configure these experiences from his life as a gay man into his music stems from his observations of his peers in the queer mainstream pop scene. Sivan had fretted about being oversexualized since his debut, but once he saw Lil Nas X give Beezlebub a lap dance in a music video that’s racked up 550 million views, he may have realized that sexual agency can only come with artistic audacity.
While Lil Nas X is no doubt a trailblazer in his own right, his “Montero” music video would not have amassed the acclaim and popularity it did were it not for a public eager to eat up such an in-your-face statement. Queerness has been submerged underneath the waves of pop music for decades, but today’s artists like Sivan, Lil Nas X, Sam Smith, Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, and oodles of others wear their queerness “out and proud” and saturate their radio-friendly music with unambiguous references to their sexual orientations and gender identities. How we’ve gotten here is a chicken–or–the–egg case: is this willingness for queer artists to imbue their music, lyrics, visuals, etc. with a hypersexual, deviant, heterosexual establishmentarianism-fucking spirit a testament to the larger progressive gay rights movement, or has their willingness to create and share their queer artistry been a part of what’s contributed to that very movement? Do politics inspire art, or do politics owe a helluva debt to art?
If the cause of this moment is up for debate, the effect is clear: ever since Sivan’s music career began a decade ago, it’s evident that it’s become less dangerous, less potentially career-ending for today’s pop artists to transmute their experiences as queer sexual beings into their artistry—which, it must be stressed, is a good thing! Politically, sodomy laws have fallen by the wayside, gay marriage in America is a go (for now), and polls indicate 79% of the population is for legal same-sex relations, up from 64% ten years ago. Public sex is still a no-no, and, yes, there’s that whole God-fearing, moonshine-slugging slice of the population that conflates homosexuality and transgenderism with Satanic pedophilia or whatever, but that group traditionally isn’t the one that plays a song enough times on TikTok for it to breach the Billboard Hot 100. The world’s population—and its pop culture darlings—has never been more openly queer, and gay art and media have never been so openly sought after.
It’s this cultural ecosystem that has allowed Sivan to climb his way up the pop star food chain, where, if someone like Taylor Swift or Beyoncé or Drake represents the apex predators at the top, Sivan is likely at least a tertiary consumer a few steps down. (I say this out of love and respect. There’s a whole debate about whether an artist like Sivan, who has never embarked on an arena tour alone and only charted sporadically, can be considered a “pop”, as in popular, star, even though he makes music within the “pop” genre. Sure, he’s performed with Swift and Ariana Grande and been impersonated by Timothée Chalamet on Saturday Night Live, but let’s be real: it’s unlikely your parents know his name.) It’s why there’s a hefty faction of the non-queer pop music audience anxious to embrace his songs about bottoming, snag his homey fragrance line… and buy his glory hole records. It’s also why, by co-opting the glory hole and all it represents—a history laden with both the exaltation and suppression of queer sexual expression, an effigy to gay men’s resilience to civic castration as well as a sobering reminder of the surveillance state that hindered our sexual liberation—Sivan positions himself in the center of a political conversation that, frankly, outweighs his artistic contribution to it.
Sivan has proven himself an astute student of pop. When he’s not co-starring in satirical, albeit shoddy, HBO dramedies about the “last truly fucking nasty, nasty bad pop girl,” he’s quick to namecheck Janet Jackson as an influence and interpolate a highly-memed Bag Raiders’ instrumental into one of his tracks. However, his usage of the glory hole image demonstrates that there’s a slight disconnect between how his knowledge of queer pop music lines up with his knowledge of queer history.
The problem is not simply that Sivan borrows and incorporates the icon into his work; after all, the appropriation by an artist of any sort of cultural device loaded with symbolic meaning is a fickle dilemma, one that’s been debated tirelessly. Generally, though, no one person or group owns the vestiges that live and breathe in our shared, overlapping social worlds. As long as such an act is done with the appropriate levels of reverence for those whose heritage is directly tied to the object, their aesthetic replication should be fair game for the sake of art’s aspiration to convert reality into something that provokes meaningful thought and feeling. The trouble here though is in Sivan’s manifestation of the glory hole. In his effort to subsume the device into his own material product, he seems to dissolve some of the glory hole’s most essential signifiers.
On the “Rush” special edition cover, Sivan performs playfulness, campiness, and, well, gayness, all of which make the effect simultaneously subversive and shallow. He not only adopts the glory hole’s iconography, but he also, quite literally, centers himself in the eye of the aperture. Practically speaking, this would defeat a central rationale for using a glory hole in the first place: anonymity. The glory hole reduces the faces and bodies of its users into mere appendages and orifices. This is for both sexually enticing and safeguarding reasons. The mutual agreement baked into the glory hole’s design is that what transpires between willing participants is confidential—that the identity of the person on the other side of the wall remains unknown. Sivan’s version, however, reasserts his identity, thereby stripping this inherent notion of anonymity and thus a large portion of the contraption’s metaphorical purpose. This might be all well and good if the intent is to interrogate and reclaim the image’s implications, or to even self-reflexively self-aggrandize his own position in queer history and queer pop music. Too bad neither Sivan nor the song “Rush” itself appears to do so.
“Rush” only tangentially evokes the ethos of the glory hole. It’s a song about sexual ecstasy, about pleasure, but not sexual degeneracy. Whereas for generations queer men’s infusion of gay sexuality into pop music was done via lyrical innuendo, ostentatious stage presence, genderbending and engendering benders, Sivan does at least firmly insert sex into the track. The double entendre of “Breathe one, two, three, take all of me, so good” that evinces taking a poppers hit and engaging in penetrative sex flares up throughout the number, and the Berlin-house beat and sprightly dynamic between Sivan’s falsetto and the macho men’s choir’s “I feel the rush” chant reinforce the push-pull of mutual flirtation, all of which culminates in Sivan asking his lover to “take me to the feeling.” Where the song loses some of its allusion to the glory hole is in its inability to conjure the thrill of anonymity or knowing transgression that characterizes it. The sex described is torrid and transient, yes, but within the boundaries of the song, no greater force presupposes a kind of potential for opprobrium. The vibe is celebratory, treating sex as something both rote and divine—just not risky.
And that’s the thing: sex via a glory hole is inherently risky. Gay men built glory holes in cruising spots such as restrooms and “adult video stores” as a way to have anonymous sex without compromising one’s identity, thereby escaping potential persecution. In states like California and Ohio, police set up their own glory holes as a means of entrapment, and it’s this double history that imbues the glory hole as a cultural object with a plethora of contradictions and loaded meanings. Even within the coterie of gay pop musicians of the last century, of which Sivan has now been inaugurated, public sex has left legal and reputational scars. Little Richard’s 1962 arrest for “spying” on men at a bus station urinal resulted in his divorce, and George Michael’s 1998 arrest in a park restroom for “lewd behavior” with an undercover police officer outed him and made for a tabloid feeding frenzy. These artists helped lay the groundwork for Sivan’s entrance into the pop pantheon. They arguably provided an indirect aesthetic thread for him to follow as well.
In this way, there’s something dubious about Sivan capitalizing on the glory hole's iconography as it represents deviant public gay sex in an era in which Sivan’s ability to engage in sex with men is more readily available than ever. Not only have cultural attitudes toward homosexuality slid toward wider tolerance, but in many of the urban centers in which Sivan lives and frequents, gay sex via hookup apps has become easier to get delivered to your door than an authentic croissant. Gone are the days in which Sivan himself would need to resort to a glory hole to get off. Gone too are the days in which the bulk of homosexual men might be driven into the privacy of a public glory hole as the safest, easiest, or most practical way to have sex.
Or at least that’s how the perception of the glory hole has changed. And in art, perception often trumps wholesale reality. In 2018, Sivan’s home country made news when the Western Australia Museum included a once heavily frequented glory hole in its collection as “a significant object in Perth’s LGBTI history.” It’s harder to name a better way to explain how an artifact’s functional heyday has ended than by its installation into a museum exhibition. That’s the thing about icons. At a certain point, they just become relics.
There is, I realize, a huge caveat to all of this, a counterargument that has been asked repeatedly of me by friends (and that nagging voice of insecurity that loves to take up as much space as possible in my brain) since I started the process of putting this essay together: why take this shit so seriously? The glory hole has become a familiar enough concept in our collective consciousness because of its role in how men have historically gotten each other off. But the reason it’s become enshrined in the tomes of gay culture, the reason it’s become an icon, is because of how it’s been reproduced, either physically or rhetorically, its imagery and its many associations passed between and across generations of queer men through stories, through insinuations, through art, often in a knowing and comical, self-referential and self-reverential, manner. Sivan’s is just the latest iteration of this cementation of its status within the gay community and its power within our imaginations, one could argue. And more than anything, it’s just plain fun.
On top of this, my assessment of this moment in history is similarly up for grabs. Queer musicians will always face an uphill battle in the pop music scene, as the experiences and sensibilities embedded in their music will never be readily approved in the same way straight musicians’ are. I also recognize that it’s not like the world has become so accepting of gay rights that everyone who listens to pop music is bumping to the beats by those of the same sex bumping uglies. In the United States alone, queer people are facing a tidal wave of political backlash from this century’s explosive gay rights movement; the backlash extends beyond the contours of pop culture to concretely affect how LGBTQ people wade through their daily lives. Things have gotten better, and yet they haven’t. Gay culture is mainstream, and yet it’s still niche. Adopting the glory hole for a piece of pop culture is radical—and yet it isn’t.
All of this is true, and apart from its veracity, it is also impossible to refute. But that’s exactly the point. The glory hole is a static object in an ever-moving, nebulous beast we call “gay culture.” It transcends time: even as it maintains origins as far back as the early 1700s, it is today found in gay bars, sex dungeons, and truck-stop restrooms across the globe. It is funny and it is not: it’s the set-up of a bad joke and the punchline of a good joke, depending on who’s telling it. It erodes the perimeters of the public and private, obscenity and sentimentality, carnal desire and intellectual propriety. Because the glory hole contains so many multitudes and divine contradictions right now, during a period of political-cultural history that contains so many multitudes and depraved contradictions, its imagery should be taken seriously, even when it is taken frivolously.
Sivan’s influence is far-reaching and unquantifiably diverse. He may have created a record cover “for the gays,” but it’s not just that. He’s introduced the glory hole into a wider cultural conversation. Perhaps he’s done this a bit too flippantly, a bit too tactlessly. That’s just my take. But as long as Sivan and any other artist hereafter appropriates its imagery (especially if it’s for commercial reasons), we should interrogate it. If the glory hole represents a space where, against all odds, gay men have been able to find and seek pleasure, then that debaucherous sanctity should be preserved. If someone is to use a glory hole in their art, they should use it appropriately; if someone is to simply use a glory hole, they should also use it appropriately (and probably wear protection). After all, a glory hole devoid of anything—whether it be cock or copious, copious amounts of meaning—is no glory hole at all. It’s just empty air.