Full nudity, however, was not allowed for the mainstream station's viewing audience. Though the bodies of engaged participants were clear to the eye, the sensationalistic broadcasters took care to blur their genitals.

The locales where such scenes take place in San Diego were reported to have been obtained from cruisingforsex.com, a site that caters to numerous lusters—among all orientations-- for the great outdoors as well as attendees who seek to comfort their sexual urges in comfort stations.

The Internet site, under its "University Listings" harshly advises its visitors to "Get An Education: Fuck a Student". No credit cards are required to enter into this "educational" domain. GayToday, in the wake of San Diego's news report, attempted early this morning to access the state of California on the cruising site. Although other states were available to the touch, California has been (temporarily?) blocked.

The cruising site's numerous listings of tearooms and other university cruising spots worldwide have been assembled with extraordinary care. Regularly updated, they provide danger alerts to the denizens of a little-known cruising subculture, one that received its first sociological evaluations as early as 1970 by Laud Humphreys, author of an academic tome titled Tearoom Trade.

According to Professor Humphreys, tearoom-cruisers who do not self-identify as gay comprise a far greater percentage of active participants in tearoom sex than those men who are openly gay. Many such cruisers, in fact, are married. This is verifiable on police records from coast to coast.

Humphreys' studies explain how far heterosexually-identified males venture into homosexual behavior while retaining their self-images as straight. The phenomenon of tearoom sex, according to Humphreys, can't be seen, therefore, as reflecting openly gay acculturation but is instead an extension, perhaps, of the closet.

Stephen O. Murray's American Gay reflects on Humphreys' "pioneer ethnography" of "non-gay identified men who have sex with men in public, though secluded places."

Cruisingforsex.com's creator, Keith Griffith, according to KGTV, is scheduled to be interviewed against backlighting on a future show.

"This TV bathroom extravaganza is the first major tearoom scandal since President Lyndon Johnson's personal aide, Walter Jenkins, was arrested in a Washington, D.C. YMCA bathroom, his pants at half-mast," said William Fales, a gay activist.

Jenkins, the father of six, was married. His politically embarrassing arrest took place in the middle of LBJ's 1964 run for the presidency.

What mainstream audiences fail to understand when confronted with tearoom sex scandals, and what many do not wish to face, say sociologists, are the implications of Dr. Alfred Kinsey's research that disrupts conventional concepts of sexual identity.

Kinsey, like Gore Vidal, believed that the words "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are artificial creations. He denied that homosexuals are a specific "type" and knew that great numbers of men who consider themselves straight nevertheless behave homosexually on a regular basis. Such men, however, are seldom met in gay bars or social groups, but, more often, in such places as public restrooms.

"Tearoom rendezvous," insisted Paul Martino, "are only a natural outcome of our society's anti-gay socialization."

Television News Director, Don Wells, e-mailed correspondent Rex Wockner an explanation for KGTV's explosive report:

"We felt this story was important to do," he said, "because it points to the fact that this activity is being actively promoted on a web site, is occurring at 1 in the afternoon in a public bathroom on a public campus, and is known to be occurring but ignored by school officials.

"I made this decision to pursue this story based on the fact that if I had children attending this school I would want to know about these circumstances. We also knew that we would only air this story on Nightcast and would not include offensive video in any earlier promos or newscast.

"Believe me," Wells assured Wockner, "I knew this story would offend some people. When I made the decision, I knew there would be people who disagreed with me. I respect those disagreements and hope that on balance you see that the stories we do are for the right reasons."

Problematic for gay activists is the fact that men who, generally, are not happily gay-identified, cruise one another anonymously in certain well-known public restrooms. A television audience that has little sophistication is unlikely to grasp this fact, confusing gay men and sexually-active men who see themselves as straight but curious.

KGTV pronounced its own report "shocking."