Have you ever been to North Queerolina? If not, there’s still time.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is hosting a history exposition indicating — among other things — where sneakers used to gather on and around campus for gay sex.

According to the Queerolina website, it’s an oral history:

Welcome to “Queerolina: Experiences of Place and Space Through Oral Histories,” an exhibit highlighting the lived experiences of UNC-Chapel Hill students who identify as LGBTQIA+. Queerolina examines spaces on campus and beyond through selected excerpts from oral histories shared by students and alums.

A couple opportunities provided by the online presentation:

• View the Queerolina Map, an exploration of places and spaces on and around the UNC-Chapel Hill campus with excerpts from oral histories.
• Learn more about the Queerolina online exhibit.

Participants can also share their own gay stories from time at the school.

Via the interactive map, a few marked locations and their memorists:

• Fetzer Gym: Finding support amongst teammates, 1996, Maia Bar Am
• Woollen Gym: Being competitive in the “gay world,” 1973, Dr. P. Allen Gray, Jr.
• Granville Towers: Being “otherized,” 1988, Mark Kleinschmidt
• The Electric Company: Chapel Hill’s gay bar, 1960s, Kent Parks
• Hinton James Dormitory: South Campus, 1985, E. Patrick Johnson
• Peabody Hall: “If anybody in this county ever finds out, your [behind] will be out of here faster than you can blink,” 1995, Christina Fisher
• Kitty Hawk Tavern: The “Tea Room,” 1950s, Clayton Jackson
• Wilson Library: Basement “Tea Room,” 1970s-2005, Larry Alford

For those unfamiliar with the term, Urban Dictionary assists:

tea room: a public men’s restroom used for homosexual activity

As noted by Campus Reform, some of the “queer histories” involve torrid tales.

In one audio clip, Larry Alford, a UNC alumnus, describes the basement of Wilson Library as a well-known meeting spot for gay men.

According to Alford, the basement had a “very large men’s room”, and “the activities that went on in that men’s room were actually pretty unsavory at times, frankly.”

Clayton Jackson, another member of the UNC community, discusses the Kitty Hawk Tavern in Raleigh, a popular meeting spot for LGBTQ students and others in the 1940s and 1950s.

Jackson described the Tavern as a place where “guys who want to pick up a trick” would go, and as “very secluded,” making it “a relatively safe place to cruise.”

“Picking up a trick” is slang for paying for sex, and “cruising” is slang for seeking anonymous gay sex.

As for Kitty Hawk’s lavatory, Clayton recalls it hosted a hole:

“[I]t was one of the few tea rooms that had glory holes in the front of the stall.”

He expounds upon the purpose of the port:

“[I]t was very easy for somebody to come in and see somebody in the stall with a hole, stand at a urinal…just turn around basically and stick your [carnal kettle] through the hole.”

The exhibition is headed by UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Pride Alum Network as part of its “The Story of Us” initiative.

“As CPAN members,” the group’s site says, “we are deeply committed to amplifying the voices of LGBTQIA experiences, and we have a unique opportunity now to tell our story and document our legacy at Carolina.”

CPAN is leading…a ground-breaking collaboration with Wilson Library, the Southern Oral History Program and the Department of Communication committed to preserving —and sharing — our voices. The project will include a permanent collection in Wilson Library, giving a broader and richer understanding of our history, not only to the LGBTQIA community but to the Carolina community as a whole.Watch the video to hear more about the Story of Us from CPAN board members, past and present student body presidents and Carolina alums.

Formally, the exhibition ran during the 2021-2022 academic year.

In a relative matter of moments, education and society have substantially changed. Not many decades ago, universities were associated with high back chairs and pipes. These days, a public school might enshrine a corner near the college where people have taken their pipes for smoking — but not in the way Sigmund Freud did it.

So goes Public Ivy school UNC-Chapel Hill, and so goes America’s evolution.

-ALEX

See more content from me:

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Find all my RedState work here.

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