Bath house for gay men
I'm a bath house virgin. I've been near many, stayed next door to one before in Montreal as well as Chicago, but never took the steps to go into one. I've chatted with friends before about their visitations to bath houses, but the conversations did not get too colorful, maybe because I was not too interested and maybe because I didn't want to know about all the penetrating details.
Gareth Johnson has recently done some leg work for us that want to understand more about bath houses, but are too nervous right now to proceed into one. Here is his chat with Twitter user and gay bathhouse enthusiast MännerSpa to talk about saunas, men, and sex.
When did you first verb a bathhouse?
I was in my early 20s — it was Steamworks in Chicago. Around the same time I also visited the legendary Man’s Country in Chicago, it’s since closed. I see those visits as being my initiation into the world of the gay bathhouse— one brand-new school, one old school.
Did it live up to your expectations?
Although I thought I knew what I was venturing in
The Club by Jarek Steele
The club is situated in a warehouse district adjacent downtown St. Louis, a low building with turn-of-the-century brickwork that looks fancy every other low brick building in the metropolis, surrounded by weedy parking lots and rusty chain link fences. When my friend Steven invited me to soak in the hot tub with him there, I had to Google it to produce sure it was what I thought it was. Honestly, I’d thought that bathhouses were a relic of the Time Before, when men ducked into gay saunas to include anonymous sex without the fear of AIDS. I grew up in the eighties and nineties and knew only the Day After, when the crusades to shut them down in cities like San Francisco and New York underscored the fear of the plague and the drive to exterminate queerness rather than caring for the sick. That terror crept into my Midwestern Southern Baptist existence and made every queer person a gay man, wasting away, an ominous cautionary tale, body poison to everyone around him. I could only see the view from the TV at the Days Inn, where I cleaned rooms; from there, queer bliss was as remo
SOMETIMES IN LIFE you verb you are on a certain type of career path, but then you take one detour to change things up a little, and you finish up going in a whole new direction, but in the end that path feels like the one you were supposed to take in the first place.
That’s what happened to me in my late twenties as an administrator for a major architectural firm in North America. To make some extra money for my yearly vacations to Europe, I thought I’d get a parttime job at a local bathhouse on the weekends doing housekeeping and cashier shifts. But within a few months at this part-time position, the architectural firm where I’d worked for years abruptly downsized, and I was one of many people who were enable go. Before I knew it, I was managing my first bathhouse and fully intertwined within the way these establishments control .
You wouldn’t think so, but observing this type of subculture from behind a counter and in the offices gives one a whole new perspective on life. The bathhouse industry, which treats men as the product, can be very raw in more ways than one.
For those that don
The Freddie Guide to: Bathhouses
What is a bathhouse?
Bathhouses – also known as baths, saunas, or gay saunas – are spaces where queer men* meet to socialise, relax and own sex. They are legal, licensed sex venues, as opposed to regular saunas or steam rooms where people cruise.
The number of gay bathhouses in North America peaked in the s. Most of them closed in the s, as local governments made public health rules to curb the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These rules were often rooted in homophobia.
Today, there are still bathhouses in most major cities across the world. You can find them through Google or on cruising sites like Squirt and Sniffies.
* Historically, bathhouses only admitted cisgender men. They are generally becoming more inclusive. Many have more relaxed door policies or adj times and events that are safer spaces for trans and non-binary people. If this applies to you, it’s best to check online or sound ahead before visiting a venue for the first time.
When you arrive
When you arrive at a bathhouse, you’ll get to a front desk with an attendant. Thi