When Jessie’s friends asked him why he’d arrived to footy 30 minutes late, he lied. The bus was running slow, he said — a nearly constant occurrence in Melbourne. When Jessie leaves his friends waiting, he usually blames it on the bus.

On any given day, in public toilets around Melbourne, hundreds of men like Jessie come together for brief and self-contained sexual encounters. Perhaps you prefer to imagine that these things are only done in dilapidated, out-of-the-way toilet blocks of the kind you avoid. In fact, the only simple way to avoid passing through an active beat in a city like Melbourne is to use the ladies’ room.

The first-floor men’s restroom at the Collins Place shopping centre is about as smart as a public lavatory can be, with well-swept imitation granite tiling and lighting fit for a jeweller’s. There are no puddles of urine or darkened corners, holes drilled in the cubicle dividers or scatological anapaests scribbled on the walls. Collins Place, a placard near its revolving doors announces, is somewhere “people meet, planned [sic] or serendipitously, celebrating a truly Melbourne character in an unrivalled location.”

Enter the first-floor men’s toilets around 1:00 pm on a weekday, and you will find every single stall closed and locked. Despite its eight-plus occupants, the room stays uncannily silent. Approach the trough urinal lining the opposite mall, and the man standing at the far end, who is not urinating, will send you a furtive glance. It just takes a moment for him to assess whether you’re there to empty your bladder or to meet another man, planned or serendipitously, for to-the-point copulation.

Unisex bathroom, Nortons Park, Wantirna South. Photo: Zachary Snowdon Smith

Jessie discovered the secret of cruising at age 15, after an older man approached him in a toilet block. The combination of immediate sexual gratification and mischief, like sneaking a cigarette, might have been designed to addict a 15-year-old.

“I couldn’t imagine it would feel that good,” says Jessie. “Downside was, I really wanted to tell my mates how good it was. But I couldn’t, for obvious reasons.”

Now 23, Jessie is studying a double degree at a reasonably prestigious Melbourne university. He’s handsome, clean-cut and possesses a body tautened by hours on the tennis court — in short, not someone incapable of finding love outside of a toilet. All the same, Jessie cuts class and leaves people waiting to spend hours bouncing between toilets in Melbourne’s central business district. Usually, Jessie finds a partner quickly. Sometimes, an entire day goes down the drain without a single successful conjugation, and Jessie is left wondering what he’s doing with his life.

Every gourmet has a favourite restaurant and every music lover has a favourite venue. Jessie has never cruised the low-key men’s room at Collins Place — he prefers the bustling facilities in Melbourne Central Station and the basement of nearby Flinders Street Station, a looming, Romanesque structure whose verdigris-coated dome is photographed by an unending stream of Chinese tourists. Railway toilets are busy and men cruising there can sometimes be brazen, standing and exhibiting themselves without much pretense of using the urinal as anything other than a prop.

The second-worst moment of Jessie’s cruising career came when he bumped into a friend’s father emerging from a bathroom cubicle at Flinders Street alongside a younger male. The normal rules of bathroom discretion prevailed — no matter how remarkably disgusting the smells you encounter, you pretend to notice nothing.

“He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t either,” says Jessie. “It was awkward as. He didn’t acknowledge me at all. I presume there is an unspoken understanding between us that we don’t say anything.”

When the train stations fill up, cruisers spill into the bathrooms of neighbouring venues — anywhere you can enter and leave without attracting the notice of waiters or doormen. In fact, Jessie had his first kiss in the men’s room of the Myer department store neighbouring Melbourne Central Station, but things rarely get that intimate.