In an extraordinary article entitled “The Voyeur’s Motel,” published in the April 11, 2016 issue of The New Yorker, Gay Talese told the story of how he became involved with a serial voyeur named Gerald Foos. Foos, in the late 1960s, had purchased the 21-room Manor House Motel in Aurora, Colorado with the express purpose of using it to spy on his guests. He wrote to Talese in 1980, telling him that, for the 15 years preceding, he had taken thorough notes on the sexual and quotidian behavior of each of his guests. Foos wrote that he considered himself to be a modern day Alfred Kinsey, but better, and that his work might be helpful to “people in general and sex researchers in particular.”
Talese visited Foos at his motel after signing a non-disclosure agreement, where, at one point, he ended up in the roof of the motel participating in the voyeurism himself. There, his tie fell through the slats of the faux ventilators that allowed for observation, threatening his own exposure. Years later, Talese obtained Foos’ manuscript, “The Voyeur’s Journal,” and his permission to write about it using his name and identifying details.
While Talese clearly presents Foos’ project as the work of a disturbed mind, it is also clear that he believes that it has some kind of value—to the point that he has reproduced much of his work here, and will do in much greater detail in an upcoming book about the motel owner’s life. Talese has high hopes for the worth of the voyeur’s observations, and notes that his book publisher, Grove Press, actually paid Foos for the use of his manuscript.
In the piece, Talese wrote of his initial hesitation to trust Foos, who had so clearly “violated his customers’ trust and invaded their privacy,” but that he also couldn’t help but feel some sort of kinship with him, since they had both taken to learning about humanity in a similar way.
“As I reread the letter, I reflected that his ‘research’ methods and motives bore some similarity to my own in ‘Thy Neighbor’s Wife,’” Talese wrote, referring to his own book, for which he managed massage parlors and hung out in a nudist commune (all with the participants’ consent). He also thought of the opening line to his book The Kingdom and the Power: “Most journalists are restless voyeurs who see the warts on the world, the imperfections in people and places.”
In looking closely at the story, it’s clear that Talese’s ambitions outweighed the numerous ethical questions the situation presented.
“I was intrigued by the notion of the voyeur, in the course of his trespasses, inadvertently serving as a social historian,” Talese wrote, referencing a book called The Other Victorians by literary critic Steven Marcus, which includes accounts from a 19th-century English man who engaged in a number of sexual and voyeuristic experiences with women of varying social classes, including servants, prostitutes, and a marchioness.
The man had the memoir anonymously published, and it eventually became a hit in Europe and America. Talese wrote that Marcus considered it “a trove of insights into the social history of the period.”
As the anonymous author wrote in his memoir, “Man cannot see too much of human nature.” I hoped that Foos’s manuscript, if I obtained permission to read it, would serve as a kind of sequel to “My Secret Life.”
But what of Foos’ records? Do they really offer the insight into the sexual culture of the 1970s that Foos insists they do and Talese hopes they might?
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