You Need to Play This Video Game Where You Avoid Cops While Giving Bathroom BJs

In 1962, police in Mansfield, Ohio — a small industrial city — set up a surveillance camera behind a two-way mirror in a men’s bathroom near the town square. The police recorded men hooking up in the bathroom over a three-week period and used the film to convict 38 men, imprisoning them in prisons and mental asylums for a year or more. And there’s a video game called ‘The Tearoom’ all about it!

The game is called The Tearoom, it’s available for a pay-what-you-want donation and it’s designed by Robert Yang, a gay Asian video game designer whose games often have overtly queer sexual themes.

RELATED | Sexy Gay Video Games: 5 Games Designed to Get You Hot and Bothered

Before we explain The Tearoom’s game mechanics, check out this play-through (warning, it’s pretty NSFW):

So basically, as you start peeing, men enter the bathroom (or “tearoom” as such cruisey bathrooms are sometimes called). You’re supposed to make eye-contact and gauge whether each man is interested. Some of the men will ignore you, others will notice and get physically violent or scared and run away. But some will return your gaze and pull out their guns.

“Guns” in this case is not a euphemism. Yang had the men’s penises resemble flesh-colored guns rather than actual human genitals in order to comply with the “vague, selectively enforced and anti-indie ban regime” of the Twitch video game platform.

If the man is interested, his gun will grow larger and you’ll get to stimulate it with your mouth. With each tongue flick, you’ll start to gain to points and, Yang writes:

 As you fill it with ammunition, the gun surface gradually transitions from a fleshy biomechanical “Cronenberg” texture to a “sexy” gunmetal finish. Then upon climax, the gun empties its blanks into the air, unavoidably bathing your face with milky gun oil.

The trick is that some of these men are also undercover cops. And if the cops catch you in the act, you’ll hear a police siren, see red and blue lights flashing and then discover a police officer pointing a flashlight and gun at you. Game over.

Yang made the game to highlight issues of violence and sexuality in video games and also to raise awareness about the intersection of LGBTQ people, bathrooms, public sex and police violence. He writes:

Historically, cops have been perhaps the #1 most dangerous enemy of gay / trans / queer people for decades, and continue to target gay people today: in 2016, the Toronto Police started “Project Marie” to target gay men who cruised parks late at night; and since at least 2004 and continuing today, the NYPD have been targeting men at the Port Authority who “seem gay“, spying on them through slits in bathroom stalls and charging them with “public indecency.”

Florida cops also recently arrested 18 men for public cruising in a park, publishing their mug shots, names and addresses before they were even found guilty in a court of law.

RELATED | The Case for Decriminalizing Gay Sex in Public Parks

Documentary filmmaker William E. Jones’ published the Mansfield, Ohio, bathroom footage in a 2007 “found documentary” entitled Tearoom. You can read about his film and see an excerpt from it below:

Shortly after these stings took place, the city of Mansfield reportedly bulldozed the men’s room and filled it in with concrete. One of the publicly shamed men committed suicide, while a few others moved away. The city of Mansfield held its first gay Pride celebration in 2015.

Yang’s other games include Cobra Club, which explores issues of privacy and dickpics; Stick Shift, a game where you pleasure “a gay car”; and Succulent, a game about deep-throating a corndog, a carrot and a popsicle.

Will you be playing a round of ‘The Tearoom’ later today?

This article was originally published on July 2, 2017. It has since been updated.