Timeline of Historic Cases
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 1943 | Newspaper editor Clarence McNulty was arrested for wilfully and obscenely exposing his person in the Lang Park toilets near Wynyard train station in Sydney, Australia. He denied the charges and this early case highlighted the practice of the police using pretty policemen (i.e. as "bait") to entrap the public. As only one police officer was present in the toilet, the magistrate determined that the police were unable to correctly corroborate the evidence and gave McNulty the benefit of the doubt. |
| 1946 | Sir George Robert Mowbray, 5th Baronet Mowbray, was fined for importuning men at Piccadilly Circus Underground station. |
| 1940s | Tom Driberg charged with indecent assault after two men shared his bed in the 1940s and used his position as a journalist several times to get off later charges when caught soliciting in public toilets by the police. |
| 1953 | Actor Sir John Gielgud was arrested and fined £10 for cottaging ("persistently importuning"). |
| 1953 | MP William J. Field was arrested for persistently importuning in a public toilet. Field appealed against the conviction twice but failed on both occasions. |
| 1954 | American mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr. arrested in a public bathroom in Santa Monica, California. He was stripped of his top-secret security clearance and fired from the think tank where he was a consultant. |
| 1956 | Sir David Milne-Watson was fined for importuning at South Kensington railway station. |
| 1962 | On 6 November 1962, actor Wilfrid Brambell was arrested in a toilet in Shepherd's Bush for persistently importuning. |
| 1964 | In October, President Lyndon B. Johnson's aide Walter Jenkins was arrested in a YMCA in Washington, D.C., and the case was subsequently dismissed. |
| 1968 | Michael Turnbull was arrested in Hull for cottaging in a public toilet, before he became Bishop of Durham. |
| 1975 | In September 1975, actor Peter Wyngarde was arrested (under his real name, Cyril Louis Goldbert) in Gloucester bus station public toilets for gross indecency with Richard Jack Whalley (a truck driver). He was fined £75. |
| 1976 | Sixty-six year old retired U.S. Major General Edwin Walker made sexual advances to an undercover police officer in a restroom at a park in Dallas, Texas on June 23, 1976, and was arrested for public lewdness. The general pleaded no contest and was fined $1,000 and court costs. |
| 1984 | Actor Leonard Sachs was fined for importuning in a public toilet. |
| 1988 | Australian radio personality Alan Jones was arrested in a public lavatory block in London's West End and charged with two counts of outraging public decency by behaving in an indecent manner under the Westminster by-laws. He was later cleared of all charges and awarded costs. |
| 1990 | British pop star Stedman Pearson (of the group Five Star) appeared at Kingston Magistrates Court in October 1990 and pleaded guilty to a charge of public indecency after being arrested in a public toilet in New Malden in London. |
| 1998 | In April 1998, pop star George Michael was arrested for "engaging in a lewd act" in a public toilet in Los Angeles after a sting operation by local police. Although he considered the arrest to be police entrapment, he pleaded "no contest" to the charge in court and was fined $810 and ordered to do 80 hours of community service. Later that year, Michael parodied the events in his music videos for the song "Outside" and was sued by one of the officers in the original arrest for portraying him as non-heterosexual and mocking him. The suit was ultimately dismissed. |
| 1998 | In October 1998, UK Labour Party MP Ron Davies was mugged at knife point on Clapham Common. He resigned after it became clear he was engaging in homosexual activities in a known cottaging area. |
| 2007 | US Senator Larry Craig was arrested in the men's public toilet in the Lindbergh Terminal of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport in Minneapolis, Minnesota, for allegedly soliciting sex. Craig later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and announced his intent to resign from office, which he later rescinded. He has since contested his guilty plea and has repeatedly tried to bring the matter to trial. |
Read more about this topic: Cottaging, Legal Status
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