Can these queer havens survive another pandemic?

Hookup apps and cultural changes had them barely hanging on. Then came COVID-19.

By ADAM M. RHODES

It’s month eight of the pandemic, and while some might be wishfully thinking about enjoying a drink from their favorite bar or ordering their favorite meal in person in the hopefully not-too-distant future, others are waiting for when they can indulge in pleasures that are harder to order to-go.

On its exterior, Steamworks is rather unremarkable. Its door isn’t clearly labeled. There aren’t any posters or advertisements on the side of the building. It looks more like an armory or a warehouse than anything else.

But in true if you know, you know fashion, the space opens up once you’re inside, past a check-in counter to a complex that includes a gym, a steam room, and saunas, as well as private rooms and public spaces to have sex—often called “play spaces”—and the opportunities they present.

To the untrained eye, gay bathhouses like Steamworks are mere dens of iniquity, where taps on the bathroom floor, a lingering glance, or a door ajar says much more than you’d expect; but to the initiated and the experienced, they are indeed that, but also so much more.

“Yes, they’re about sex,” says Gary Wasdin, executive director of the Leather Archives & Museum. “We don’t run from that, we don’t hide from that because, you know, sex is awesome. And having, you know, a lot of sex is awesome. But, there was always this concurrent side that was just as important, especially in the 60s and 70s, as bathhouses emerged and became popular. You know, even just meeting with your friends to hang out and chat was dangerous in this country.”

The explosion of dating apps and the

Like many explicitly queer spaces, bathhouses were frequently the target of homophobic vice raids in the 1960s and ’70s. While gay sex was an obvious and significant part of bathhouses, the greater conversation about them has largely ignored the civic good also undertaken at these spaces.

A 2010 article from World of Wonder, the production company behind the RuPaul’s Drag Race franchise, details that before the 1980 presidential election, the New St. Marks Baths in New York City and the League of Women Voters held a registration drive at the now-shuttered gay bathhouse.

And according to an exhibit at the Leather Archives & Museum about the now-closed Man’s Country bathhouse in Chicago, owner Chuck Renslow closed the glory holes and the orgy room at the bathhouse in the 1980s after the HIV/AIDS crisis reached the city.

According to the exhibit, safe sex pamphlets and condoms were passed out at the bathhouse after the HIV virus had been identified, and STI testing was done at a clinic upstairs at the bathouse.

That community work continues to this