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Remember the American politician who got caught with his pants down, in a public toilet? That wasn’t the problem of course, since that’s what you do in those little closet-spaces. The problem was that he was apparently trying to solicit sex from an undercover police agent, or so the agent thought and he arrested Larry Craig, a Republican senator from Idaho at the Minneapolis-St Paul airport in June 2007. The story made headlines, in part because of Craig’s reported remark in self-defense that he merely had a wide stance: his foot brushed that of the agent in the next cubicle.

And then most of us forgot about it. But now Craig’s  appeal is coming up and MinnPost, a community online newspaper in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, carries a post by Matt Ehling, a local TV and documentary film producer, about the “underlying legal issues” in the case. It’s a window into the American legal system and the sometimes mind-boggling twists and turns it can take. I was drifting down through the article, reflecting on the role of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in the case, and the public debate in the state about what constitutes an invitation to sex, when one line in particular caught my eye: “…that conduct would be protected under State v. Bryant, a 1970 Minnesota Supreme Court decision which holds that ‘individuals who engage in sex in closed stalls in public restrooms have a reasonable expectation of privacy.’”

Wow. I lived in Minnesota in 1970 and a lot of the people I knew were having sex in odd places, with back seats of cars as the most popular spot, but I didn’t know anyone who felt comfortable doing it in a public restroom. Elevators were theoretically all the rage, thanks to Hollywood, but toilets? Legally? A friend in next-door Wisconsin was hauled in for lewd, licentious and lascivious behaviour that year for not wearing underpants in the back seat of a car (they were on the ledge behind the seat). I had no idea at the time that Minnesota was so liberal.

The agent said Craig stared through the cracks between the cubicles for so long that he knew the colour of Craig’s eyes.

I do hope Craig has now learned the value and even pleasure of having a good book along when sitting down on the toilet.

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