Bathhouse

A men-only venue of steam rooms, saunas and private cubicles where gay men go, in a towel, to meet for sex; in Britain and Europe it is called a sauna.

A gay bathhouse is a men-only venue built around steam, towels and sex: you pay at the door, get a locker or a small private room, strip down to a towel and wander the steam room, the sauna, the corridors and the cubicles until you find someone. Americans say bathhouse or "the baths", the British and most of Europe say sauna.

It is not a spa, though some pretend to be, and it is not a gym, though some have a few weights in a corner. It is a place where everyone knows why everyone else is there, which is exactly what makes it relaxing.

Where it comes from

Public baths existed long before gay ones. The historian Allan Bérubé traced how, from at least the 1890s, some ordinary American bathhouses became favorite spots for men looking for men, usually because a manager or an attendant, or a policeman, looked the other way. Over the first half of the 20th century the gay crowd grew, and by the 1950s and 1960s a new kind of bathhouse had appeared: owned or run for gay men, with locked cubicles, steam rooms, group rooms and mazes designed for sex, and managers who tried to protect customers from blackmail and police raids.

In the 1970s the baths were at their height, part sex club and part community center, with pools, film screenings and a social life of their own.

AIDS and after

AIDS turned the baths into a political battlefield. In San Francisco, on October 9, 1984, the city's health director ordered fourteen bathhouses and sex clubs closed; most reopened within a day, and a long court fight followed over whether they should be shut or turned into places for safe-sex education. Bérubé's own history of the baths was written to argue the second view. Other cities fought the same battle, and many baths never came back.

Today bathhouses and saunas survive in most big cities, alongside darkrooms in bars and dedicated sex clubs. Many hand out condoms and lube at the desk, some host testing nights and PrEP information, and on the apps men post "at the sauna, room 12" as an open invitation.

Close relatives

• Darkroom and backroom: the sex area of a bar, with clothes optional rather than off.
• Glory hole: a standard feature of many saunas.
• Cottaging and tearoom: what men did before the baths gave them a door with a lock.

Related terms