glory-hole

Crappleberry / Deviant Art

In the 1820s, a glory-hole was a slang term for a “junk drawer” (no, not that kind of junk). Other 19th-century uses include small compartments on ships and other small rooms along with some still-current specialized uses in glass-blowing, engineering, and mining. The glory, here, apparently goes back to a Scots word meaning “muddy.”

… but that’s probably not why you’re here.

In the 1930s, we see glory-hole again as a slang term for a “junk drawer”—and yes, that kind of junk, as in the penis, with glory-hole as a vulgar nickname for “vagina.” Glory, here, apparently alludes to sexual pleasure and hole, well, you can figure that one out. This glory-hole led to a different sexual sense defined in the 1949 underground Gay Girls Guide as: “Phallic size hole in partition between toilet booths. Sometimes used also for a mere peep-hole.” The term may draw on an earlier use of glory-hole as slang for a “gay bar” in the 1920s.

In the mid-1900s, glory-holes were so cut into bathroom stalls in order to facilitate homosexual liaisons, among other places and for other reasons. With the rise of the adult-film industry in the 1970s, glory-holes were also found in specially-fitted booths in adult-video shops. The internet has since proliferated glory-hole as a pornography genre, especially for heterosexual sex acts.