EXCERPT
Closure: the gay bathhouse and its discontents
The following are three brief excerpts from Closure. The first two focus on the St. Mark’s Baths, drawn from my own and others’ research. The third section is from one of the more than forty interviews I have conducted asking men about their relationship to gay baths and saunas.
I.
A WORLD INSIDE
Until a feUntil
a few years ago, a plaque affixed to the brick walls of the five-story
building at 6 St. Mark’s Place, a few doors East of Third Avenue
in Manhattan, memorialized the site where, from 1834-1836, the winter
residence of novelist James Fenimore Cooper stood. The historic marker
made no mention of the seventy years, 1915-1985, during which the current
building contained a bathhouse; certain bodies of history remain draped.
On June 9On
June 9, 1994, Bruce Mailman, the owner of the New St. Mark’s
Baths since 1977, died at the age of 55 from complications related to
AIDS. By that time, 220,000 men, women, and children had died of the disease.
Six months before his death, he lost the final appeal to the courts to
reopen his bathhouse, which the City of New York closed as a health risk
in 1985. The New York State Sanitary Code allowed this closing of commercial
establishments if patrons were seen performing vaginal, anal, or oral
intercourse. Citing a 1974 case involving the Moose and the Elks Clubs,
whose activities had been of a somewhat different character, the Court
said in its final judgment that the city had a right to close any place
where “the nature of the assemblage is not for the advancement of
beliefs or the airing of grievances, but predominantly either for entertainment
or personal gratification.” During the nine years of this case,
the Baths had sulked on St. Mark’s Place, waiting for the party
to begin again. Many of its former guests had died, and the building became
more and more of a relic, an accusation, an uncomfortable and ambiguous
symbol of both freedom and loss.
Since MailSince Mailman’s transformation
of the place into the all-gay, all-the-time New St. Mark’s Baths
in the mid seventies, the place had never locked its doors. When the Health
inspectors were sent to padlock the entrance in December of 1985, Mailman
was asked for the key for the front door. There was none. It had been
a 24-hour, 7 day a week business, having shut down only briefly when one
of the bathrooms flooded; tissue paper soaked in a flammable drug, meant
to be inhaled, had been thrown in the toilet with a lit match. The toilet
exploded. The mess was mopped up, and the Baths were back in business.
Just whatJust
what that business was lay at the center of the debate over closing.
For many men, gay bathhouses were a place where their sexuality was safe,
where the moral strictures of the outside world, ignoring or criminalizing
their desires, would not rule their bodies. In a demimonde of naked men,
sex could be safe, erotic, and enjoyable; a merging of desire and pleasure
impossible to achieve outside. Many long- term friendships and love affairs
began at the baths, and groups of men would return together, treating
the bathhouse as a gathering place, another kind of home. The baths were
much safer than the parks or other public cruising areas, the usual dangerous
terrain allowed the sexual outlaw. Here was a place where sex could be
both sensual and secure. As one patron, AIDS activist Michael Callen,
recalled: “The baths invited men to think of their bodies as temples.”
One could now worship openly within these enclosed spaces…
II.
GETTING CLOSE TO THE SUBJECT
I seldom pI seldom participated in the institutions
that defined, in subcultural fashion, the tenor of urban gay male identity
in the eighties: The Saint nightclub, the parties on the Pines in Fire
Island, The Black Party, the White Party, the Morning Party, the St. Mark’s
baths; places and events that defined both joy and deviance, casting the
heavens with a new roster of angels. That I participated in almost none
of them, yet feel as if I did, or should have, is testament to their place
as myth, and the triumph of “lifestyle” over one’s actual
life.
Most of tMost of the sites, have been boarded
up, knocked down, or sold. The legendary parties are held “in exile”
at rented halls. Bruce Mailman, owner of the St. Mark’s Baths and
the Saint, is dead; that he died of AIDS is either completely relevant,
cruelly ironic, or both. We seek connections, and we would like to point
the finger, or at least put our finger on the problem, but it always slides
out from underneath. He is dead, and his business, the ON Company, survived
to sell off his assets. The temple of the body is fleeting, and temporary
replacement is the pattern of pop culture. In 1985, the doors to Mailman’s
temple were padlocked, the result of the early agony over AIDS, an agony
that at the time seemed a passing thing; if only the causative agent could
be found and our behavior educated and (self) regulated. We assumed that
AIDS was an aberration, a single bad check passed on a path to prosperity
and acceptance. No films were ever shot in the bathhouse, and the few
existing photographs were taken when it was empty. The life lived there
does not exist except as memory. Many of those who would remember have
died. Perhaps it would have been more dignified to simply vanish, on a
street like St. Mark’s, where pop culture precariously reigns. Perhaps
the bathhouse should have simply disappeared, burned down like the St.
Mark’s Church just a block away, and lovingly rebuilt by order of
the community. Instead, the building’s disappearance came as a makeover,
not a tear-down; a new facade for a new market. The St. Mark’s is
now a video store. If we can’t live life, at least we can rent it…
VI.
ONLY CONNECT: NIGHTS (AND DAYS) IN A BATHHOUSE 1960-2000
1.
No Regrets: 1962-80
In
1962, BIn
1962, Brad
came to New York from Washington, D.C. to visit a friend of his father:
“I think you will get along with him very well.” This friend,
the gay, alcoholic black sheep of a wealthy insurance family, sized him
up: “You’re a very nervous boy; you should go to the baths.”
And so the twenty-two year old made his first trek to the Penn Post Baths,
between the General Post Office and Pennsylvania Station, a good location
for a young man in transition. Brad descended the stairway to the entrance,
where one paid before entering the baths proper (or improper). Before
sliding into activity, he was directed to a small changing room to don
the iconic uniform of towel around waist. Suitably undressed, Brad wandered
into the main space, scattered with bunk beds. There were only two rooms
to explore, the other being the steam room at the end of a long hall.
Both were crowded, pressing the newcomer into contact. A visitor found
it difficult to simply watch, as the physical dimensions of the place
pulled the viewer into action. This interaction was tactile, with eye
contact avoided. To Brad, a particularly shy young man, this made the
experience all the more sexual, while adding an unexpected aura of modesty:
“It wasn’t demure, it was male after all. But there was still
modesty in gay life then, a masculine modesty.” Although there were
no private rooms at this bathhouse, a bunk bed could be colonized for
a couple, a trio, or even a soloist observing. The steam room, the bunk
house, the halls, all were public spaces, but this public shared the collective
heat of desire, which filled up any available space.
When BraWhen Brad returned from his expedition,
his host greeted him with the question “My dear, did you find love?”
to which the still glowing Brad responded that he had not, but he did
have a really good time. Later that year, he did indeed find a long term
lover at the baths, a discovery he describes now as “a major mistake.”
Brad was not looking for permanence and commitment (he was only twenty-two),
but something more satisfying than the blow jobs offered by younger men
to older in D.C.’s Lafayette Park. In the baths, the outer world
did not enter at all. “When the doors closed, you really were in
another world. What was out there stayed out.” Even some of the
rigid demarcations of age were fluid inside the baths. In the nineteen
sixties, a young gay man carried with him the belief that he must make
the best of his youth, for by age thirty-five, he was sure to be “washed-up,”
and part of that older cohort in some urban park, prey to the cruelties
of the ousted world. Looking back now, a still adventurous older man,
Brad realizes the folly of such a rigid chronology, but back then “I
believed it.” Yet entering the baths, he saw a broader mix of ages,
and acts, than those available in a public park. Things truly were different
inside; “The door closed, you paid your money, and you were in your
own world.”...
©Jeff McMahon 2002