As I research the places lesbians have gathered, I’m sometimes reminded of the spaces we didn’t have—like bathhouses.
As I wrote in Issue 5 of this newsletter, the urge to wonder why lesbians lack a thing that is plentiful for gay men is stinkin’ thinkin’. Lesbians and gay men have some shared experiences, but we’re definitely not identical, and that kind of side-by-side comparison treats gay men’s culture as the norm—the template that lesbian culture should be measured against. That’s not the case. Obviously, lesbians are from Venus, and gay men are from Uranus.
Still, I can’t help wondering if I would’ve been a patron if lesbian bathhouses had they been “a thing” when I was coming out. (Who am I kidding? Almost certainly not!)
The 2013 documentary Continental made the Continental Baths, which operated between 1968 and 1975 at 74th and Broadway in Manhattan, seem like very heaven. The Continental contained an indoor pool that the owner claimed was the largest in the world at the time, a sauna, a steam room, an upscale restaurant, a hair salon, a boutique, a disco in which towel-clad men danced 24 hours a day, a room that held religious services on Friday and Sunday nights, and the spaces it was best known for, 400 individual rooms and two large orgy spaces—one with lights and one that was kept in almost complete darkness—where men could screw with complete abandon. (The Continental closed before the AIDS crisis, but it did operate a clinic where patrons could get tested for STIs.)
Looking at old gay publications, it’s striking just how many bathhouses operated in the 1970s. The Gay Insider, a bitchy 1971 guide to gay New York, listed seven in Manhattan alone—while admitting there were others the author had chosen not to include. Despite modest entrance fees, they were clearly a good business: In Continental, club owner Steve Ostrow describes checking out another bathhouse 50 blocks downtown before he committed to investing in the Continental. Standing outside the Everard Baths—described in The Gay Insider as having “scabby walls, [a] rancid pool and putrid-smelling steam room”—they saw 60 men entering every hour, day and night. (In May 1977, nine men were killed in a fire, and the poor condition of the place—along with panels covering the windows—were said to have hampered firefighters’ attempts to fight the blaze.)
The baths were, of course, men-only, but in 1975, Rita Mae Brown published a story about going “undercover” at the Club Baths. (The Gay Insider found this venue almost embarrassingly luxurious, right down to the livery: “In addition to the regulation towel, you will be assigned a designer-original sarong, stain-resistant and lined with terry cloth. Emblazoned on it will be the Club signet, an orgy scene.”) I’m not sure how much I really believe Brown’s account of her night at the baths, but she deserves kudos for combining titillating descriptions of all that was on offer at the Club with observations about how men look at men in the sex-segregated world of the baths, contrasted with how men look at women out in the world. “The leer is gone. The thinly disguised hostility of the street vanishes,” she claimed. Similarly, “As you bump through the dim puzzle [the Club was famous for its maze] you get groped, but it’s gentle compared to the kind of grabbing a woman gets on a subway”
Because most bathhouses operated as private clubs, they were open all hours, which is the part I’m most envious of. I’m not imaginative enough to picture myself taking advantage of the Continental’s hedonistic delights—but I would’ve loved to know of a place where you could literally spend the night in relative safety. Maybe things are different in a country where young people have access to cars, but so many of my youthful efforts to find queer community were stymied by bus schedules and calculations of whether I felt safe navigating from a back-street pub to the bus station. In an 1976 essay called “The Bath Life Gets Respectability,” Arthur Bell describes how, when he was a teenager living with his parents in Montreal, he’d spend weekends with his Brooklyn-based grandparents. “Often,” he writes, “I'd tell my grandmother that I was staying over with a friend and spend the night at the Everard Baths. It represented freedom to me—a place where I could have sex without plodding through the required conversation of a bar, where points are given for social status and artistic tastes and deducted for not knowing ‘Farley’ and ‘Mabel’ and for staying in the wrong borougħ.“
(The bathhouse-review "illustrations" are taken from the Feb. 7, 1972, issue of Gay NYC.)
RECOMMENDATIONS: In the last month or so, I caught up on a couple of recent-ish mysteries by a writer I’ve been reading for decades: Val McDermid. I first knew her Lindsay Gordon series that started in the 1980s—books that were set in explicitly feminist settings, like the Greenham Common women's peace encampment—but she’s written several others since then, some of which have found their way onto TV. (This is a controversial opinion, but I also really like the very light radio mysteries she’s written for the BBC, featuring DSI Alma Blair, played by Julie Hesmondhalgh.) The books I read recently, 1979, the start of a new series centered on a young Glasgow journalist, and The Skeleton Road, a stand-alone in which detective Karen Pirie finds herself digging into the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, were good mystery stories, but they were really excellent at weaving lesbian characters and queer relationships into the warp and weft of everyday life.
LISTEN TO ME: On Working, I had a really fun conversation with Malinda Lo, whose most recent novel Last Night at the Telegraph Club won a National Book Award, and on the second Working Overtime, Isaac Butler, Karen Han, and I discussed the merits—and otherwise—of the Pomodoro technique.
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