SYNOPSIS
One
of thOne
of the
most contentious issues in American society concerns the definition of
public morality and public space. In particular, gay sexual culture has
been at the forefront of debates over the propriety of public sex (or
any purely recreational sex at all). In the mid-eighties, this argument
spiraled-out from the battle over whether to close down gay bathhouses.
Because of the particular path of the AIDS virus in this country, discussion
regarding public sex has focused on gay men, and on the bathhouse in particular.
The doors of many such places were forced open, not necessarily to foster
honesty and openness, but to serve political expediency.
In the firsIn the first two chapters of Closure,
I begin by tracing the history of the St. Mark’s Baths, a gay mecca
in early eighties New York, as well as the history of public bathhouses
in general. From that factual and historical material, I build a second
chapter that is much more subjective, breaking into the historical account
with a personal narrative of my own visits to a gay bathhouse. As readers
are most often drawn to facts which are integrated and offset with stories,
that discursive balance is a critical part of my writing, moving between
reportorial, anecdotal, and analytical treatments to open up a closed
world.
In expandIn
expanding Closure, I am enlarging my examination of public
sex and sexuality by adding more anecdotal information, gleaned through
interviews with former (and current) bathhouse patrons, as well as the
principals involved in creating and running the St. Mark’s and other
bathhouses in New York, San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.
In this way, the diverse and contradictory responses to sexuality, via
the evolution and public perception of the gay bathhouse, will be revealed.
I will be interviewing long-term couples who began their relationships
in the baths, as well as those in the gay community who question whether
the baths are even capable of instigating such permanence. Through such
anecdotes and histories, I will link real lives to such concepts as promiscuity,
fidelity, safety, and morality. These stories will be balanced by factual
material linking the mid-eighties bathhouse closings under the Koch administration
to the recent cleansing of New York City by the Giuliani administration.
Having written (in The New York Blade News) on the controversy over the
closing of the West Side piers, I will also relate recent protests over
the disappearance and/or policing of other public spaces where gay men
gather (the Rambles of Central Park, the piers, Washington Square Park),
to the controversy over the baths, and the overall constriction and privatization
of public space.
The book The book will be designed for a
broad audience, pairing intellectual debates and arguments with personal
stories (mine and others’) to illustrate how the gay bathhouse played
a key part in the development of current images and assumptions about
sex and sexuality. This evolving perception of what is “safe”
and what is “clean” will be a major theme of the book, as
will the changing definition of privacy, commitment, and freedom, and
the stability of these concepts in society.
While the While the book will initially use
the St. Mark’s as an example, I will be examining the political
and social responses to gay bathhouses in several American cities, as
well as in London, Amsterdam, Montreal, and possibly Tokyo. Corollary
to that will be a discussion of bathhouses in other cultures, and the
place of sexual behavior in them. In Chapter 1, I provide a short history
of public bathing in New York City; an additional chapter will touch briefly
on public bathing, nakedness, and sensuality in the Japanese sento, Jewish
mikvah, Turkish hammam, and the European health spa culture.
As part ofAs part of the history of our changing
attitudes toward bathhouses, I will contrast the legal and political issues
involved in the closing of the St. Mark’s in New York, and all bathhouses
in San Francisco, while those in Montreal remained open and visible. The
book will provide a brief chronology of laws that govern morality as they
pertain to the baths and to the use of public space for sexual behavior,
while bringing in literary (fictional as well as non-fictional) and cinematic
accounts of bathhouses and gay sexual behavior. It is through an understanding
of this legislative, judicial, and cultural history that I will frame
the current argument over proper sexual behavior for gay men. Incorporating
this debate between pro-monogamy activists (Larry Kramer, Michelangelo
Signorile, Gabriel Rotello) and advocates of sexual freedom (Michael Warner,
Sex Panic!), the book will in particular explore the definition of “promiscuity,”
a word which has seen its meaning change radically in the past twenty
years.
Although Although numerous bathhouses were
closed down in the mid-eighties, many still exist, or have metamorphosed
into sex clubs, theme restaurants, or traveling parties. I will chronicle
how the existing establishments have adapted, both before and after the
onset of AIDS, to the strictures of public health, and how the very character
of exchanges that occur in such places of public sex may have changed.
How did the growth of pornographic videos, and their introduction into
these dark spaces, change sexual behavior? Were sexual exchanges transformed
(as Daniel Harris argues in The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture)?
I will also specifically explore the contrast between New York, London,
and San Francisco’s response to the AIDS crisis in relation to bathhouses,
and discover what effect such measures as removing doors from rooms had
on sexual behavior in the baths. Did this encourage a more public intimacy,
or make gay sex more of a performance? How did these sometimes well-meaning
public health efforts affect gay intimacy, privacy, and safety? Have subsequent
AIDS prevention approaches been built on misconstruels of gay sexuality
(as Walt Odets suggests in his In The Shadow of an Epidemic? Through
examination of one aspect of gay subculture, larger issues within the
culture may be reviewed.
There areThere are not many photos of gay
bathhouses, but I continue to hunt for images to use in the book. The
photographer Dona Ann McAdams, whose book Caught in the Act was
published by Aperture, would provide a photo of a demonstration in front
of the St. Mark’s before it closed. I will also go through the archives
of the Gay and Lesbian Center in New York, The One Institute in Los Angeles,
and the International Museum of Gay/Lesbian History in San Francisco to
collect ephemera (photos, advertisements) relating to the baths. Additional
illustrations to consider might be Charles Demuth’s watercolors
of bathhouses from the 1910's, Bill Jacobson’s haunting photographs
of blurry, ghostlike figures, Stephen Barker’s dark and hazy photos
of men in sex clubs, and Robert Flynt’s photographs of bodies suspended
in water (none of these photographers have bathhouses as their subject,
yet their work evokes them). The Wessell+O’Connor Gallery and the
Leslie Lohman Gallery, both of whom show gay-themed photography, will
be consulted as part of this search.
Writing onWriting on sex can suffer from
being either rigidly analytical or blurred by personal involvement. Although,
as chronicled in the second chapter of Closure, I have been an
occasional patron of gay bathhouses, they were not a central part of my
early sexual development. While doing research for this project, the complicated
and shifting meaning of safety revealed itself to me, as did the shadings
of what is public and what is private in sexuality. After having been
intellectually intrigued by the debate over bathhouses, I have deepened
my research to include actual participation, an anthropological stance
that can be revealing when the boundaries are clear to the reader. Combing
through material on public sexuality, I have discovered connections and
experienced epiphanies, and in my more applied research have found my
own responses to be both tonic and troubling. This book is an attempt
to compare and contrast some of my own sexual narratives with those of
a larger subculture, one to which I have an uneasy relationship. To debate
the place of the gay bathhouse in contemporary society, we have to understand
its context and history, placing it within a continuum that leads both
into, and out of, the historical fact of AIDS. We need to be honest about
our own involvement in the sexual culture, and acknowledge the way in
which research can become a personal journey; one that might create illumination
where there has been isolation.
Although Although there have been a few other
articles about the gay bathhouse, there are none that connect personal,
anecdotal narratives with historical, factual material in a non-academic
fashion. Regardless of their sexual orientation, colleagues to whom I
have described the project respond that such a book is both timely and
overdue, and needs to be written by someone whose stance is not polemical
or partisan. I think the enclosed indicates that I am that person. This
book will be an essential contribution to gay historical studies, social
and cultural studies, oral history, and the evolving relationship between
cities, sex, and the law. The bathhouse was an enclosed space, and this
book is an attempt to reveal what the walls, and the activities occurring
within them, represent in the development of gay subculture.
For the pFor the past twenty years, I have
been known primarily as a performance artist, writer, choreographer, and
filmmaker, receiving eight fellowships from the National Endowment for
the Arts. Most of my performance work has been distinguished by extensive
use of text, which I compose as part of the live performance. In addition
to my performance work, I have written numerous nonfiction essays, focusing
on personal, political, and cultural subjects, and been published in The
New England Review, Threepenny Review, New York Blade News, City Limits,
Performing Arts Journal, Teaching Tolerance, XXX Fruit, Movement Research
Journal, and several other journals and books. In 1996, I began work
toward an MFA in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia,
awarded in October 1998. My thesis project, a memoir entitled Safe
As Houses: One Artist’s Life in New York City 1980-1990 , traces
the evolution of my life as an artist in New York and the defining role
two pieces of real estate played; Performance Space 122, and my low income
co-op in the Lower East Side. Although it is a separate project from Closure,
both focus on the shifting nature of personal and social history. In recognition
of my work on Closure, I received a Paul Monette/Roger Horwitz
Trust Research and Scholarship Award for 2001. Based on my research on this subject, I was invited to present a lecture regarding bathhouses for the 2004 meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, Western Division, in San Diego.
© Jeff McMahon 2004