Steam

I have to confess that I have never been big on the baths. I know they were huge in the late seventies and early eighties, but by the nineties they have all but run their course. In the early eighties, after AIDS started breaking havoc in the community, men stayed away in droves and they all but disappeared.

I think that if not for AIDS, they would have kept being basically a social center in the gay of many gay men. The baths were a place of absolute freedom, both mentally and physically and that, I think, is something that not even Grindr can bring. It was another time and even though gay men have always built our desire around some kind of ideal clone, things were much different in the late seventies and early eighties.

Nowadays, there are not many gay bathhouses in the United States. In Chicago, I understand there were two very famous ones, and one is gone now. I went to that bathhouse before they tore it down. It was called Man's Country and apparently it was the oldest bathhouse in Chicago. It was on Clark, in a building that looked like many other buildings in the street. But inside, it was kind of a puzzle: it had many rooms and each room had to be both social and practical. We had a guide, a guy in his forties with bright eyes and a goatee. Barrel chested and with a quick smile he made us feel like we could ask anything. And we did.

I was there with a group of people who were going to visit the bathhouse before they demolish it. You see, they sold it after more than forty years of giving gay men a place to find solace, sex and community. Take into account that back in the seventies and eighties there was no Grindr, not Scruff, no sex takeout menu in your phone. If gay men (closeted or not) wanted some nookie, they went to a bathhouse. The baths were the place where a gay man could be, well, gay. Many gay men do not remember what it was to go to a bathhouse because they were a casualty of AIDS.

When AIDS stroke, bathhouses became the foci of transmission and at the same time the boogieman to which fear could be attached. And it may not have been all paranoia. Back int the day, there were no condoms required before a man boned you, men engaged in sex in an absolutely free way and I imagine there may have been conversations about STDs but sometimes not even that. Especially at a bathhouse, where the purpose was basically pleasure. So when AIDS came, many men were not willing to give up that freedom. Same sex marriage was not even an idea, being gay was still seen as a mental illness by many and the religious right was very much finding its voice and pointing a judgmental finger at gay sex. So, to many, the baths contributed to the spread of AIDS and in a blink a whole generation of gay men were gone. The disease robbed us of countless lives and talents and left a void in the history of gay America.

During that tour we learned many things about the bathhouse and how there existed The Eagle, a leather bar, was located there. There were parts of it designed to look like the sewers of Paris. There was a huge fish tank. There was still artwork on the walls. We were told they were going to be taken to the Leather Museum (where we learned about this tour) and that they were originals painted in place by Etienne, a very well known illustrator.

It was a bittersweet tour. So many stories, so many lives have found solace and company behind those walls. So much pleasure. So much pain. But I guess it did fulfill a need and filled a void in the lives of all those men who went there. Today it's gone. There's still a clothing store there that was part of the complex. I want to go back some day and buy something. It's part of gay history. And I want to help keep that history alive.

XOXO