BATHOUSES
HISTORY OF BATHHOUSES
Per Wikipedia: Records of men meeting for sex with other men in bathhouses date back to the 15th century. A tradition of public baths dates back to the 6th century BC, and there are many ancient records of homosexual activity in Greece.
“Bathhouses…were public spaces for socializing and intimacy, “For gay men … such places …provided rituals that were both sexual and social”. [Social Landscape: LGBTQ Heritage in Seattle’s Pioneer Square Rich Freitas]
Extra info from Wikipedia: [4] In the West, gay men have been using bathhouses for sex since at least the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when homosexual acts were illegal in most Western countries and men who were caught engaging in homosexual acts were often arrested and publicly humiliated. Men began frequenting cruising areas such as bathhouses, public parks, alleys, train and bus stations, adult theaters, public lavatories (cottages or tearooms), and gym changing rooms where they could meet other men for sex. Some bathhouse owners tried to prevent sex among patrons while others, mindful of profits or prepared to risk prosecution, overlooked discreet homosexual activity.[5]
Photo credit below: https://www.advocate.com/politics/2018/2/02/30-infamous-police-raids-gay-bars-and-bathhouses
“Bathhouses evolved in gay institutions not by themselves, but in the context of the slowly developing sexual landscape in the nation’s cities. Men–both heterosexual and homosexual–chose to meet each other in the bathhouses as alternatives to other places, usually for reasons of safety and privacy. Historical records beginning in the 1890s document the 4 major stages in which bathhouses evolved into homosexual institutions.
1. Ordinary Bathhouses: Places where men would occasionally have sex but where it was unusual.
2. Favorite Spots: These bathhouses–and YMCAs–developed reputations as “favorite spots” for men to have sex with each other. Word got out that a certain manager, masseur, employee or police officer would look the other way when they were on duty, or that homosexuals were known to gather there at certain hours, usually in the afternoon or late at night. Some private bathhouse owners tried to prevent their places from becoming popular homosexual spots and called in the police or hired thugs and private guards. Others did not discourage their specialized clientele, paid off the cop on the neighborhood beat, told the managers and employees to keep things discreet, and increased their profits.
3. Early Gay Bathhouses: Mostly evolved in the 1920s and 1930s. Physically, they were no different than other Turkish or Russian baths, except that sex was permitted in closed and locked cubicles. These places were subject to raids by vice squads, in which the employees, managers and owners could be arrested with their patrons. The owners sometimes tried to protect their patrons from arrest, blackmail, and violence, if at all possible, without hurting their businesses.
4. In the 1950s and 1960s, the first Modern Gay Bathhouses began to open. These places were meant to be exclusively gay and catered to the sexual and social needs of gay men. With the beginning of the gay liberation movement in the 1970s, these bathhouses went through dramatic changes. Today there are approximately 200 gay bathhouses in the United States, from Great Falls, Minnesota and Toledo, Ohio to New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. [36 GAY BATHHOUSES AND PUBLIC HEALTH POLICY Downloaded By: [Trinity College Dublin] At: 02:30 1 March 2010]
Many of the advantages of modern gay bathhouses were already recognized in the newspaper, medical and legal reports describing the earliest “favorite spots”:
1. Safety: Patrons felt they were more protected from blackmail at the baths than in other public places; the baths seemed to offer an alternative to sex in the public parks; and there was additional safety in numbers and in their identification as homosexual baths, because those who would be offended by the behavior there would not go there or would leave.
2. Democracy and Camaraderie: Some accounts describe “the early gay bathhouses” as refuges from society’s prejudice against homosexuals, as oases of freedom and homosexual camaraderie. The clientele was primarily homosexual and from a variety of occupations and classes, temporarily “democratic” in their nakedness. Members of the staff, too, were sometimes homosexual making these early baths one of the first identifiably gay social and sexual institutions.
3. Privacy: Sex took place in an establishment separated from the general citizenry. This created the first urban zone of privacy, as well as safety, for gay men.
4. Erotic Facilities: Cabins, steam rooms, dressing rooms, pools and hot air rooms were all available for meeting other patrons. At primarily homosexual establishments, patrons could feel secure that other patrons would not be offended by physical intimacy between men.
5. A Social Environment: Old friendships could be renewed, “new intimacies” were “ever in the air.” Patrons socialized with each other in the common areas.
6. Protection: The management and employees often tried to protect the patrons from violence and blackmail: the police generally allowed the bathhouses to stay open because they were discreet “outlets for the vast homosexual life of the city” and because some of the “best citizens went there.”
From The History of Gay Bathhouses Allan Bérubé: Bathhouses had really taken off around the 1950s in the United States. Following World War II, a more robust underground gay culture began to emerge, spurred in part by the companionship that queer soldiers found in the military. Bathhouses provided a safe place for these men to gather. Less risky than meeting in public, regular patrons knew each other and could self-regulate the scene, looking out for each others’ safety.
Gay bathhouses weren’t just places to have sex. And many institutions provided entertainment, drinks and casual social events that catered to queer men who didn’t want to go to a bar. In the 1980s, many New York City bathhouses even conducted voter registration. [https://hornet.com/stories/gay-bathhouse-history/]
With bathhouses there always seem to end up with a scandal or two. Let’s trip over to Europe first…
There is a long history dealing with bath houses or public baths. When it comes to the history of men having sex – documented cases start around 1492 in Florence Italy. On April 11, 1492, the city’s leading criminal court, The Eight of Watch issued several decrees concerning sodomy, warning managers of such establishments to keep out "suspect boys" on penalty of a fine. Within a two year period 44 men were convicted of same-sex relationships.
During the same time in Granada, Spain which was a Muslim city, Queen Isabel the Catholic closed all public bath houses to curtail such activity.
Other instances were in Paris at the Bains de Gymnase [Baths of Gymnasium] on the Rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière. The year was 1876 when six men with ages ranging from 14 to 22 were prosecuted for "offence against public decency" whereas the manager and two employees were also prosecuted but for "facilitating pederasty".
Moving to America, on February 21, 1903, the Ariston Hotel Baths was the first recorded bath house that was raided. From the Bathhouses « Queer Queries (wordpress.com)
The Ariston Hotel Baths: 1897 Located in the Basement of the Ariston Hotel at the corner of Broadway and 55th Street in New York City, the Russian and Turkish baths at the Ariston were designed by architect George “Galbert” Caldwell and owned by Herman Hoefer. The Baths provided a public setting for the free sexual expression of the queer, biologically male community. In mid-February of 1903, the police began to spy on the establishment. Undercover officers took note of the encounters taking place there, and on February 21st, Police raided the Baths, detaining 60 men and arresting 14. According the Minneapolis Journal (February 23, 1903), “The raid on the Turkish bath in the basement of the Ariston at Fifty-fifth St. and Broadway, on Sunday morning, was the source of satisfaction to Commissioner Greene, who said it was one of the biggest raids made. The evidence, he said, has been gained by Central Office men, and Acting Inspector Walsh.” The Sun (New York City, February 25th, 1903) writes, “Magistrate Pool spent all day yesterday in the West Side police court listening to the charges against fifteen of the men arrested in the Sunday morning raid on the Ariston baths, Fifty-fifth street and Broadway. He held eleven for felony, nine under $2,000 bail each, one under $1,700 and one under $3,500.”
The following is an example of the type of questioning that took place during early Spring of 1903, from the microfilmed court transcripts in the John Joy Criminal College’s Lloyd Sealy Library in New York City:
Q: What did you notice the defendant do?
A: He walked over to the couch that the man Walter Bennett was lying on…And he placed his penis in the anus of the man Walter Bennett and kept it there for a short time.
Q: Now, did you notice the state of the defendant’s genital organ or penis, at the time that, as you say, he placed it in the anus of the man Walter Bennett?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: In what state was it?
A: It was in a state of erection.
Q: And what, if anything, did he do to Bennett other than that act?
A: Oh, he laid down, after he withdrew his penis from –
Q: Well, after he withdrew his penis, did you notice the penis of the defendant?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: And in what condition was the penis of the defendant, after he had withdrawn it from the anus of Bennett?
A: In a state of collapse
Of the thirty-seven men who were arrested, many were charged with gross immorality, convicted, and sentenced. This incident marks the first homophobic police raid.
Everard Baths: 1888-1985
Located at 28 West 28th Street in New York City and converted from a church to a bathhouse in 1888 and was patronized by gay men before the 1920s and by the 1930s had a reputation as the "classiest, safest, and best known of the baths". It was opened by James Everard as a Turkish Bath. By the 1930’s, it was well known for providing a distinguished social venue for the queer community and continued to do so until it closed in 1985. It is known as the “classiest, safest, and best known” of the bathhouses (Miller, 1995), eventually earning the nickname “everhard”.
On May 25th, 1977, the Everard suffered a deadly fire, which killed nine patrons (ages 17 to 40) which destroyed the top two floors entirely. The floors were rebuilt, and the baths reopened, however, it was shut down in April 1986 by New York City mayor Ed Koch, as a part of the New York City Health Department’s decision to shut down all off the city’s bathhouses in response to concerns over the spread of AIDS. Openly queer novelist James McCourt wrote about the Everard Baths in his book, Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985: “Everybody went to the Everard Baths…From Alfred Lunt and Lorenz Hart to Charles James dressed up in a long sheet tied into a 1913 hobble skirt to Gore Vidal to Nureyev. Et cetera! The place reeked of the experiences of men caught up in history, of the destinies of their own kind, of war and chemistry and a life truly lived (McCourt, 111).”
There also was the Produce Exchange Baths in the 1910s but the one additional to mention is The Lafayette Baths located on 403-405 Lafayette Street as it was managed by two well known Broadway composers who were also brothers, Ira and George Gershwin. No mention of them every owning this bathhouse or that they were gay has been substantiated by Wikipedia, books, interviews by this researcher. It has been purported that American precisionist painter Charles Demuth frequented the Lafayette Baths, which inspired some of his art such as the 1918 Turkish Bath with Self Portrait.
The history of bathhouses also include entertainers. Well known singer/actress/comedian/entertainer Bette Midler received her start at the Continental Baths in NYC which consisted of 400 private rooms, a sauna, a swimming pool, vending machines full of drinks laced with acid and ecstasy and small disco dance floor, a cabaret lounge with a baby grand piano just feet from the Olympic size pool. She along with the house pianist Barry Manilow [who, like the bathhouse patrons, sometimes wore only a white towel] sang and played ‘the house’ and where she created her stage persona "the Divine Miss M." She has remarked, Despite the way things turned out [with the AIDS crisis], I'm still proud of those days [when I got my start singing at the gay bathhouses]. I feel like I was at the forefront of the gay liberation movement, and I hope I did my part to help it move forward. So, I kind of wear the label of 'Bathhouse Betty' with pride. She wasn’t the only one to ‘hit the stage at the baths’. In the years the bath was open 1968-1975 approximately 96 performers from Eleanor Steber, Melba Moore, Labelle, Peter Allen, Cab Calloway, The Manhattan Transfer, John Davidson, and Wayland Flowers/Madam performed there.
That was the east coast, now the west coast has its share as well.
Bathhouses In California the "Consenting Adult Sex Bill", passed in January 1976, made gay bathhouses and the sex that took place within them legal for the first time. During the 1970s, the two most popular gay bathhouses in San Francisco, both located in the SOMA neighborhood, were the Ritch Street Health Club at 330 Ritch St., the interior of which was designed like a Minoan palace, and The Barracks, a BDSM bathhouse at 72 Hallam near Folsom in which each room was designed to accommodate a different BDSM sexual fantasy. In 1978 a group of police officers raided the Liberty Baths in the Polk Gulch neighborhood of San Francisco and arrested three patrons for "lewd conduct in a public place", but the District Attorney's office soon dropped the charges against them.[5] In 1984, however, fear of AIDS caused the San Francisco Health department, with the support of some gay activists such as Randy Shilts, and against the opposition of other gay activists, to ask the courts to close gay bathhouses in the city. The court, under Judge Roy Wonder, instead issued a court order that limited sexual practices and disallowed renting of private rooms in bathhouses, so that sexual activity could be monitored, as a public health measure. Some of the bathhouses tried to live within the strict rules of this court order, but many of them felt they could not easily do business under the new rules and closed. Eventually, the few remaining actual bathhouses succumbed to either economic pressures or the continuing legal pressures of the city and finally closed. Several sex clubs, which were not officially bathhouses, continued to operate indefinitely and operate to this day, though following strict rules under the court order and city regulations. Bathhouses themselves, however, operate just outside the city, thus outside of their laws, such as in Berkeley and San Jose.
It must be noted that when the era of AIDS struck the community, it also struck bars and bathhouses. Per book A Curious and Peculiar People – “San Francisco gay bathhouses were closed by city order in a move to protect public health. (page 251)
HISTORY OF BATHHOUSES IN OREGON
“I took a brief trip to the downtown Multnomah County Library to look in the phone directories to see what existed. From my first cursory investigation I looked up “steam bath,” “sauna,” and “bath house” in the Yellow Pages. I checked books from a few decades, 1956, 1963, 1973, and 1983. Everything I found was listed under "steam bath." So "steam bath" was the proper vehicular for a bath house sixty years ago and probably earlier.
In 1956 a number of steam baths from at least the 1920s were still in business. (Nothing listed in the 1983 directory is still open today.) Below I list everything from 1956. I figured by using this year there was a good chance that there would be a link between the original business/structure from the steam bath's heyday and a structure which would still be standing. Later I hit the pavement and sought out the original locations for the 1956 businesses. Surprisingly--with the exception of a "ladies" steam bath that listed an in determinant address--all of the buildings are still standing!” t i n y g o g o : An historical sketch, steam baths in Portland, Oregon circa 1956
From the Oregon Encyclopedia: After the war some bars became exclusively LGB while other venues, such as the Music Hall, with its drag performers, grew increasingly popular. Bathhouses, such as the Aero-Vapor, came into their own in the 1960s. A crackdown on bars, drag shows, and cruising areas in city parks occurred between 1949 and 1964; the latter year is when alarmed authorities worried that Portland was “fast becoming a small San Francisco.”
First identified bathhouse frequented and that accepted same-sex male activity was Aero-Vapors Bathhouse, 1237 S.W. Third. The whole block was torn down as part of the South Auditorium Urban Renewal Project and made into a park known as Terry Schrunk Plaza. It should be noted that Terry Schrunk, mayor of Portland along with Portland City Council were strictly anti-gay when in 1964 a Committee for Decent Literature and Films was formed and the council tried to close down six bars – the OLCC declined to have them closed.
Per David Grant Kohl’s book A Curious and Peculiar People he writes, “The Aero Vapors … was the best known, with twenty-two canvas bunks and a maximum capacity for sixty-seven “guests.”
The second known gay bathhouse was the Olympic Baths 359 SW Morrison/4th Ave [on the east side of 4th] opened in September 1971. There is a reference for their “1st Notice the “1st Anniversary” Sept 1972 -ad in The Fountain newspaper. The Olympic was forced to move as the Blue Mouse “block” was being torn down to build a 483-space parking garage along with Grand Oasis Tavern and The Blue Mouse Theatre. In the Northwest Gay Review June 1977 an ad that states: New Temporary Location! Which was two blocks down and the site of the former McMahon Mineral Baths, 509 S.W. Fourth/SW Washington. At this location it was in the basement with an Olympic sized pool. McMahon Mineral Baths was considered to be oldest public steam/bathhouses in Portland opening around 1903. Note, it was not considered the oldest GAY, but just the oldest in existence as a public steam/bathhouse. Some have stated and is not documented, that McMahon’s was related to male sexual activity going as far back as the 1950s due to the fact it was across the street from the notorious Circle Theater which was located at 516 SW 4th Ave (east side of SW 4th and Washington). [see Movie Houses – Theatres]
It’s unclear when it changed its name, but research shows this happened around 1971 or 1973 when it became Olympic Sauna and Bath when Olympic moved from its location at 359 SW Morrison. To enter the facility, you entered from the street on Fourth, down some stairs into the basement where you were greeted by not only someone to tell you the amenities, but also by the large pool in the middle of the room.
In the 70s, the Olympics’ entrance was part of businesses on the west side of 4th between Washington and Alder which included an art gallery, This Speck of Earth [315 S.W. Morrison] and an adult bookstore.
Other bathhouses followed, but most faced a dilemma during the AIDS crises of the 1980s and eventually many closed. Check out each bathhouse above for dates, amenities, locations, etc.