Steamroomography

STRANGER! if you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me?
And why should I not speak to you?

~ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

When you draw open the frosted glass door and step into the vaporous underworld, you have no more than ten seconds to find a seat. Even ten seconds, come to think of it, might give you away – not offend so much as divulge to fellow steamers your inexperience or, more troublingly, your imprudence. The trick is to score the best possible spot using those maneuvers that you, like most gay men, procured in your teens and mastered in your twenties: flicking and flickering sidelong glances that piece together the periphery like a snake’s dancing tongue.

You try to surmise the following: how many men are lounging? Is there one obviously captivating contender? One entirely without pulchritude? One your father’s age? Your grandfather’s? While selecting a slot on the tessellated stone bench is your first order of business, there is, in those ephemeral instances, another impression to cull from the room. It can only be described as a sort of rippling among the steamers, like the twinkling of dewy grass – covert adjustments of towels, fingers, legs, eyes. Whether or not you see this will determine what happens next.

Reconnoitering under the cover of steam, you choose your seat, take a few breaths, then delicately appraise your tradecraft. If you’ve landed next to a looker, you’ve done well. Seated between two lookers, the osmosis of eros alone will likely prove gratifying. Next to a nonagenarian or an ogler, or far away from an inked up, muscular dish? There are corrective strategies, which we’ll review in a moment. But first: that ripple effect. The residue of the cover-up. Not unlike the “rustle, rustle, rustle” of men hastily reclothing themselves, as John Koch described cruising in Central Park’s forested maze, The Ramble, in the 1960s. “If someone saw the cops coming, they’d take a stick and start beating it,” Koch, an Iowa farm boy who moved to Manhattan in his youth, said in Charles Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis. “All of a sudden you’d hear these clothes being put on.”¹Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History
of Gay Life in America (2007). Grove Press. p. 147.

In the steam room, there are usually no such alarm bells, though on occasion an unselfish, usually unbeautiful man over 35, standing sentry near the doorway under the pretense of stretching, will clear his throat or rap his knuckles against the wall when someone approaches. The point is, if you do glimpse the ruffling of towels covering up erections, it means you’ve disturbed a state of group masturbation in full swing – what henceforth shall be called “full steam.” In such scenarios, the room will be watching you closely to infer the viability of resumption. Your blessing here is easy to give: you must merely lock eyes with a few gentlemen who are to your taste and slide one hand under your towel. From their cotton tarpaulins, erections ’round the room will emerge, like cannons for a 21-gun salute, and back to “full steam” it’ll go.

More often than not, however, the room upon your entry will be still. You’ll sit down, look up, and fall back upon the codes and ploys of which gay men have availed themselves since Western (and Eastern and African and Arab) moralism strangled all permutations of non-procreative sex.

“Homosexuals were not allowed to elaborate a system of courtship,” Michel Foucault said in a 1982 interview. “The wink on the street, the split-second decision to get it on, the speed with which homosexual relations are consummated: all these are products of an interdiction.”²Michel Foucault, James O’Higgens, “Sexual Choice,
Sexual Act.” Salmagundi 58/59 (1982).

Even so, what a marvelous nexus of codes our asperities yielded and still yield! Some of them are timeless, global, deeply anchored in instinct. Others evolve, annexing new spaces and machines. Almost all exploit three things: public space, eye contact, and the premises of desexualization upon which same-sex places are founded. “Sexual perverts readily recognize each other, although they may have never met before, and there exists a mysterious bond of psychological sympathy between them,” historian George Chauncey cited a New York doctor as having written in 1892.³George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1995). Basic Books. p. 187.

In the 1940s, according to Chauncey, the customary consummation of a more-than-second-long interlocking of eyes in public was for one man to ask the other for the time or a match. So well-known in the subculture were such pick-up lines that one only had to ask an undercover cop for a light in order to be thrown in jail for “degenerate, disorderly conduct.”⁴Chauncey p. 172.

In the 1970s, wrote Edmund White and Charles Silverstein in The Joy of Gay Sex, eye contact on the street was usually followed by a backwards glance to confirm attraction, then a beeline to the nearest store window, where loitering was permitted for commercialism’s sake. There, the two could exchange small talk and solicitations. Also popular in the 70s were handkerchiefs, which tops would dangle from their left back pockets and bottoms from their right ones; occasionally the cloths were color-coded to alert passing cognoscente of the wearer’s prevailing kink.

Of course, these were decades when men like you were called “degenerates,” “deviants,” “perverts,” and “pansies.” Long before AIDS, homosexuality itself was seen as “an epidemic infecting the nation,” as historian John D’Emilio chronicled⁵John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities : The Making Of A Homosexual Minority In The United States, 1940-1970 (1983). The University of Chicago Press. p. 44. – or, as Time magazine in 1966 wrote in earnest, as a “case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life.”⁶Editorial, “Essay: The Homosexual in America.” Time. (1966). Consensual sodomy, something for which gay men around the world, overcome by physical desire, risked imprisonment and execution, was decreed by all fifty states⁷The Associated Press, “Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Law Banning Sodomy.” The New York Times (2003). to be a “crime against nature.”⁸Legal Information Institute, “Crime Against Nature.” Cornell Law School. In 1963, The New York Times noted that “sexual inverts,” carrying the preventable and curable disease of homosexuality, had “colonized three areas of the city.”⁹Robert C. Dotythe, “Growth of Overt Homosexuality In City Provokes Wide Concern.” The New York Times (1963). Ten years later, when the American Psychiatric Association removed gayness from its list of mental disorders, the Times announced: “Psychiatrists, in a Shift, Declare Homosexuality No Mental Illness.”¹⁰Richard D. Lyons, “Psychia-rists, in a Shift, Declare Homosexuality No Mental Illness.” The New York Times (1973). Shortly before the declassification, Black Panther Party founder Huey Newton said homosexuals were possibly “the most oppressed people in the society.”¹¹Huey P. Newton, “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements.” Speech (1970).

Today, it hardly needs stating, your asperities as a New York City dweller have mostly dwindled into the death throes of interdictions past. Policemen have been replaced by gym managers, prohibitory statutes by marriage licenses, violent mobs by bored regard, social pariahdom by corporate sublimation, and epidemiological alarmism by sanitary guidelines that reach as far as men’s rectal health. Even the Times expiated its prudery a few years ago with a magazine feature.¹²Kurt Soller. “Six Times Journalists on the Paper’s History of Covering AIDS and Gay Issues.” The New York Times Style Magazine (2018). Still, cruising persists. Ciphers persist. Sex in public, albeit a progressively privatized public, persists. Our “many, many little public sidewalk contacts,” Jane Jacobs wrote in 1961 (not about cruising, but not to worry), “is ostensibly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all.”¹³Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1992). Vintage. p. 56. To wave off the enduring prevalence, the joy, of cruising in cities and towns like and unlike New York – to call it cheap or shallow or unduly gleeful about stereotypes of promiscuity – does worse than trivialize a unique daily experience of a numberless number of men who have sex with men. It also misses a lively argot that continues to score sex under millions of unnoticing noses. It misses the significance of this subversive temptation’s analog forms having survived all digital expedients, from Craigslist to Grindr. Freed from its bitterest strains of consequence, the recreationalization of risky sex more blithely than ever bares its fascinating underbelly – and surely fascination alone is worth our time.

No one seems to have counted exactly how many men’s locker rooms at the 31,000 health and fitness centers nationwide display signs that warn against sexual activity.¹⁴“The 2021 IHRSA Media Report: Part 2.” Health & Fitness Association (2021). Even if Miami, Los Angeles, and Manhattan are a lenient measure, the opportunism appears widespread.

“ATTENTION MEMBERS,” read a sign a few years ago at a West Hollywood branch of Crunch. “Please DO NOT HAVE SEX in the Men’s Locker Room! You can have sex literally anywhere else, just not at Crunch Fitness.”¹⁵Cameron Greer, “LA Gym Tells Members To Stop Having Sex In Men’s Locker Room.” The Sword (2021).

In 2018, a lawsuit against Equinox alleging routinely overlooked sexual activity in its West Village steam room even made its way to New York State’s Supreme Court.¹⁶Alexander v. Equinox Holdings LLC. Index No. 451832/2018 (2019). “I thought, ‘No escape, I’m going to be sexually assaulted,’” the (straight) plaintiff said to the New York Post about a particularly disturbing day on which he saw three men skylarking in the steam.¹⁷Kathianne Boniello, “Men in gym steam room masturbated
while watching customer: suit.” New York Post (2018). According to the Post, the gym’s manager assured the plaintiff that “it’s something that every gym in New York City, not just Equinox, has an issue with.” Alas, the poor man’s case was dismissed.

And so we return to your place on the bench in that sultry, oblong, marmoreal room. You’ve just settled down and taken in the towel-clad phalanx. Seven men. You’re the eighth. The handsomest of the lot, directly across from you, is closely flanked on both sides by steamers who are also fairly desirable. To the right of this triad, just a touch apart, is an older man, a Kenny Rogers type, with a white beard and thick white hair, eyeing you a little too intently. On your side of the room – you gather after some casual neck rolls – a tall, army-looking bloke, covered in discrete, colorful tattoos, sits to your left. To your right, several feet away, are a plump, mustached fellow and another next to him, pressed against the corner, mostly cloaked in the mentholated fog.

Unsurprisingly, Kenny Rogers makes the first move. He moves his hand to his crotch, rests it atop the towel, and looks around. No one moves. He desists, a sod unsought. You take a few deep breaths. Aside from the intermittent hissing of steam from the pipe near the door, the room is silent. This is good. Silence and public sexual aspiration tend to work in concert. In fact, speaking in the room, puncturing the surreptitiously unpredictable air with fraternity, often serves as a deliberate statement: “I come in sexlessness.”

After a few moments, you glance at the burly jewel across from you. He looks about 28, with tousled black hair, thick lips, thick thighs, thick pectorals. His eyes meet yours, then turn downward. His hands stay still. Is he…? You follow his eyes down to his feet. Two of his toenails are painted! Maybe he is!

Several minutes later, Kenny Rogers leaves the room. Almost as soon as the door closes behind him, the beauty’s eyes meet yours again. His hand stirs. He moves it slowly toward his crotch. (Evidently, he hadn’t wanted to grant ol’ Kenny the pleasure of voyeurism.) The two men next to him do the same. One spreads his legs, tautening his towel. Beneath it, you glimpse a growing pink wand. The soldier next to you follows suit, massaging his groin and stretching his thigh toward yours, closer, closer, until the space between them is electrically infinitesimal, like the gap between God’s and Adam’s forefingers. You notice the two men in the corner also have their hands on their laps, waiting for your green light like runners on their marks. While eye contact, outstretched thighs, and racy towel arrangements doubtlessly bring about effective preludes and barometric readings, it is this gestural beacon that trumps the rest: if every steamer poises one hand at the brink of self-molestation, the room opens like a combination lock into industrious jollification. But if even a single steamer abstains, the lock remains – or ought to remain, in the case of those few madcap exhibitionists – shut, in deference to the straight or unaroused or wholly oblivious teetotaler with his arms crossed.

You delicately reach under your towel and behold: “full steam” ahead!

But an approaching shadow and swinging door abruptly end the session, and seven moray eels retreat into their towels. (The ripple effect!) The newcomer swaggers in and sits next to you. His comportment isn’t promising. For one thing, you can pick out black swim trunks underneath his towel, a chastity belt if ever there were one. More ominous are his earphones, not only because he’s wearing them to begin with, but also because through them you can hear the sibilating of hip-hop. Together, his signals evoke the aposematic coloration of the poison dart frog: “Touch me and you die.” The heterosexual leans back and closes his eyes. On cue, two steamers – the soldier and one of the beauty’s flankers – leave for a shower break.

There’s now an empty seat next to the beauty. You know that the optimal scenario ends with you pressed up against him, working hard and handily toward his satisfaction. But you can’t stand up just to shuffle seats. This would too nakedly evince your Machiavellianism. You have to play it like a chess game and proceed craftily, patiently, indirectly. You leave the room to take a shower – nothing more than a blast of cold water, so you can hurry back to that valuable slab of real estate next to the beauty before it’s privateered by someone else.

To your relief, you find the slab vacant. You slide in next to him, close but not too close, as the grooving, meditating heterosexual is still in the room, now across from you. There’s nothing to do but wait.

Ten minutes pass. Another ten. You grow dizzy. The steamers around you turn steadily redder. Kenny Rogers is back, now on the other side of the beauty. Come to think of it, you’ve seen Kenny before. He’s one of those pestilent patrons who come to the gym seven days a week to steam, stare, and shower, never climbing the four flights of stairs to lift weights or cycle up their heart rate. As a result, his body is droopy, not a muscle in sight, which is a pity given his barrel chest and splendid head of hair. It wouldn’t take him more than a few weeks of exercise to morph into a bearish daddy. Still, if his daily visits have imparted any sort of physical stamina, it’s in his capacity to sit in the room for hours in a state of cardiovascular hibernation, waiting for those scopophilic moments when a group of steamy young men reaches completion. Strangely, you’ve never seen Kenny himself finish. Maybe he’s rationing the hydration.

Finally, the heterosexual strides out of the room. You and the remaining five steamers are too overheated to waste a second. Even the beauty no longer cares that Kenny is on the edge of his seat, waiting to eyeball the beauty’s magic wand. Kenny’s parasitic perseverance triumphs at moments like these, for out the wands come. The beauty seizes yours and you the beauty’s. You want to bow your head and swallow him whole, but you’re unsure where he lies on the dominance scale. Generally, or at least simplistically, tops love head bowers, bottoms love head bowing, and versatiles are happy whichever way the wind blows. The beauty seems to sense some twitch of longing, for he moves his hand around to your back and slides it lower, lower, until his index finger finds your compact, circular entrance. A clear signal. Down you swoop.

Like most men who sit outside the bounds of fussy bodily beauty, Kenny is usually content with voyeurism – but now, riding a spasm of impudence, he reaches out and touches the beauty’s thigh. The beauty coolly raises his arm to wipe sweat from his face; in doing so, he brushes Kenny’s hand away. Kenny gets the message and returns to his ogling. Still, he wasn’t altogether foolish to try. Though not nearly as diverse as last century’s gay porn theaters, which famously lined Times Square, the steam room can occasion its own version of democratic opportunity. The sex it quarters is extemporaneous, and a man who meets few to none of some dreamboat’s out-of-room criteria might, in the heat of distraction or ambivalence or generosity, be able to watch, stroke, even swallow him. If he’s rebuffed once, and the dreamboat (like the beauty) really is the stuff of fantasies, the pursuer might also be able to draw on the many muscle-engorging instruments upstairs to purchase the dreamboat’s attraction, after a few months of hard work, using the room’s crude reserve currency: sightly flesh.

In “Queen for a Day,” surely the most entertaining essay ever written about gay bathhouses, Rita Mae Brown remarked about the hundreds of naked men at one East Village institution in the 1970s: “a new hierarchy took place among these lawyers, artists, grocery clerks, stockbrokers, movement activists, professors, and cab drivers. Rank now came through size of penis, condition of body, and age. The pretty young thing reigns, a sexual prima donna.”¹⁸Rita Mae Brown, “Queen For a Day: Stranger in Paradise.” Lavender Culture (1978). p. 73.

Obviously, the steam room also is robustly hierarchical. The injustices of this pyramid of desirability doubtlessly merit their own disquisition, although the range of steamers’ distinct tastes and quirks does cater to a surprisingly expansive pool of colors, shapes, and ages. Still, when a beautiful man walks in, everyone can’t help but look up – not unlike those summer concerts at Central Park’s Mall in the 1930s, when gathering crowds of gay men were “so thick,” as one man recalled, according to Chauncey, “that if one were to walk through with a strikingly handsome male friend, one would be conscious of creating something of a sensation – there would be whisperings, nods, suddenly turned heads, staring eyes.”¹⁹Chauncey p. 183.

In this underworld, the matter of consent carries the thrills and dangers of something like settler colonialism. United against institutional authority, steamers must forge amid the lawlessness their own gestural ethics of inclusion and exclusion, forbearance and philanthropy. These come to adjudicate your encounters with individuals and groups – and also how you tolerate a leerer, brush off a grasper, rebuke a serial grasper, and, on the darker side of solicitation, how you yourself swallow rejection.

Most often, this scruffy, intuitive framework works well. In “Queen for a Day,” Brown, a lesbian, described gluing on a mustache and sneaking into The Club, a bathhouse on First Avenue and First Street, to observe for herself the rituals of gay men in the wild. She found that “men look at each other differently than men look at women. The leer is gone, the thinly disguised hostility of the street vanishes. Here the eyes zoom to the crotch,” and “the easiness of refusal is incredible. In heterosexual life and lesbian life a first refusal never sinks in.”²⁰Brown p. 72.

Of course, politics in the steam room are sometimes inevitable. Silent feuds fester. A singular snub can, for months thereafter, breed hostile looks or averted eyes or frosty side-by-side undressings in the locker room. On the other hand, politics also ameliorate. Like that time you nearly came to blows in the weight room when a towering, professional wrestler-looking fellow annexed your space – the floor manager even stepped in and asked him to relocate – an hour before you ended up servicing him in the steam room and all was forgiven. Now, you trade nods and peeps, just another incarnation of heteronomy in the gym’s sea of dichotomies.

This duplicitous life is layered. It’s literal and metaphorical. The locker room is below ground, the gym floor three stories above it. Men court the reception staff with smiles and pleasantries before shiftily breaking club rules and city ordinances. Upstairs, an exercising dude barely acknowledges another whose semen he once swallowed – or otherwise employs fraternal cant: “Hey bro, you using those weights?” – while downstairs, post-workout and enveloped in fog, one has a finger in the other’s rectum. This modality of stealth is due less to matters of law and shame – though the preservation of dignity plays a part – than to the rush of dicey adventure, however mimetic or minor.

The truth is, in these daily hours, you become a sort of argonaut in trance – free to undermine, liaise, dissipate, and redefine, all in secret, within the maze of lockers, the hot fog, the half open shower stalls and bathroom doors, the choreography of eyes and thighs and hands. And when it’s over, you disappear into the crowded East Village street beyond the cabal’s doors, a less closeted version of the writer Emlyn Williams’s description, recounted by Chauncey, of a gentleman leaving a gay bathhouse in 1927: “Roman apparition transformed into businessman – hat, overcoat with velvet collar, spats, briefcase – to be seen on a weekday evening in his hundreds on the sidewalks, hailing a taxi to take him to Grand Central and home to his wife in Westchester County.”²¹Chauncey p. 220.

For as long as men have sought furtive sex with other men, public space, especially when it’s gendered, has provided holy ground – bubbles of anarchic liberty amid sludgy backwaters crawling with vice hunters and nature preservationists. In this respect, perhaps no city in the world is more flatteringly historicized than New York, for generations an effervescent flute of champagne in a world of flat sacramental wines. “Men having sex with each other had no legal right to privacy,” historian Allan Bérubé wrote in his essay about the evolution of bathhouses.²²Allan Bérubé, “The History
of Gay Bathhouses.” The Journal of Homosexuality 44:3-4 (2003): p. 34. Instead, they had to find their privacy in public – and what sexual publics New York City yielded!

It’s hard to find a book of gay history written after 1990 that is more commonly cited than George Chauncey’s Gay New York, a gem of the canon for its vivid proof of subcultures that weathered and outwitted adversity through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Chauncey, Kaiser, and many others weave a patchwork of Manhattan’s classic cruising hotspots: Harlem, Chelsea, Union Square, Central Park, Washington Square Park, underneath the elevated subway tracks on Third Avenue, the Rockefeller Center skating rink, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Museum of Natural History, subway stations, empty subway cars, covered wagons, the backs of trucks, stairwells, roofs, backyards, cellars, doorways, and loading docks.

When the 70s brought about the “most libertine period that the Western world has ever seen since Rome” – esteemed as such by one of the men interviewed in Joseph Lovett’s 2006 documentary, Gay Sex in the 70s – the piers by Christopher Street and the abandoned warehouses by the West Side Highway rose to the top of this list of hotspots. At the piers, “there were thousands of people fucking in the dark,” another interviewee recalled, “every day of the week. No matter what the weather.” There, the age-old adjacency of gay sex and jeopardy showed its teeth in the men who fell through decaying wooden floors of warehouses in the dead of night, their corpses later found bobbing in the Hudson.

Sometimes, blue collar workers eating their lunch by the piers would amusedly survey the bonking men. Sort of like the straights today who passively permit canoodling in the steam room when signals have been misread or patience has run dry. On occasion, and this is surely a sign of the times, it seems as if such straights stay in the room on principle, wanting more than anything not to appear homophobic — an impressive reversal of those nights, described by Kaiser, at the Hotel Astor’s oval-shaped bar in the 1940s, when gays would gather on one side and straights on the other, the latter able to kiss and fondle while the gays, who’d promptly be booted if they did anything of the sort, had to sit and watch.²³Kaiser p. 14.

Just as New York leads Western cities in sheer volume of recorded gay public sex, the most prodigally exploited public space in the history of such sex is, without a doubt, the bathroom. Here, the sequestering of sexes; the innocent, routine grounds for bouts of nudity; the functional closeness of urinals, over which men stand, shoulder-to-shoulder, often without barriers – all are irresistibly erotic to those for whom such images aren’t at all virginal and for whom sex has always necessitated some deviance or, at least, deviation. To put it another way: the shared bathroom, for so many gay men, never is – and never was – an entirely utilitarian space. Bodily procedures in this porcelain wilderness thereby become intertwined with sexual shelter and sexual possibility, equal parts human necessity and subterfuge for lingering, peering, baring, and consummating.

Until they were whittled away by budget cuts in the 1970s, high crime in the 1980s, and the 9/11 attacks, nearly every subway station in New York City had a restroom. For decades, such toilet rooms – “tearooms” in gay parlance – comprised the city’s de facto mecca of no-strings-attached gay sex.

In Petite Mort, a collection of illustrations and recollections of cruising in New York, Aiken Forrett paid tribute to his favorite toilet:

Definitely The World Trade Center. Stop #1 on a sex tour of the WTC would be the men’s room on the lower level near the entrance to the PATH trains – where you could find rows of guys jerking off 24/7 since the day it opened ’til the day it blew up. There was every combination of guys there: from workmen, delivery boys, shop workers, executives, tourists, random dads, and well…you name it. Lunch hour was typically out of control and the cops would periodically try to bust it up by standing around for a while with their walkie-talkies turned up loud for effect, or they’d knock a nightstick on the stalls and bark something like ‘OK ladies, time to break it up.’ But then the minute they’d leave, the boys would be back at it.²⁴Carlos Motta, Joshua Lubin-Levy, Petite Mort: Recollections of a Queer Public (2011). Forever & Today, Inc. p. 146.

The NYPD tactics that Forrett described sound a tad more forgiving than those at the start of the century, when vice squad agents would go as far as hiding behind the grills facing bathroom stalls and cutting holes in the ceiling, all to catch men in the act. In 1921, Chauncey wrote, thirty eight percent of men arrested for homosexual activity were detained in subway restrooms.²⁵Chauncey p. 197.

So meshed with cruising were the dangers of police raids that Robert Yang’s 2017 video game “The Tearoom” uses undercover cops as its primary doom factor in the player’s quest to suck off willing strangers in a small roadside bathroom in Ohio — the same infamous public bathroom surveilled by hidden police cameras in 1962.²⁶“Tearoom, a document presented by William E. Jones.” Los Angeles Film Forum (2008). The sting operation led to the imprisonment, on sodomy charges, of dozens of men of various races and classes.

In Yang’s game, the player looks compulsively and nervously over his shoulder, pretending to pee. His real aim is to lavishly lick a fellow urinator’s gun, which Yang selected in place of a penis in order to dodge the retrograde taboos of American censors. Besides undercover cops, the game’s main hazards include accidentally prolonged eye contact with a straight guy and not deft enough eye contact with a prospective gun-flaunter – elements, Yang wrote, that were “hard to design because decades of male heterosexual hegemony have trained gamers into thinking of ‘looking’ as a ‘free’ action, with few consequences or results.”²⁷Robert Yang, “The Tearoom as a record of risky business.” Radiator Design Blog (2017). Gay men, of course, know all too well that eye contact, while easy to gluttonize, holds electrifying power. The briefest interlock can unfurl a map of sexual possibility.

There is something obviously erotic – and tortured – about the fervor with which undercover policemen have pursued sodomy charges through the ages. Kaiser reported that plainclothes police officers through the 1960s would wave around their erections in bathrooms and cinema halls to entrap homosexuals.²⁸Kaiser P. 13. Chauncey told the story of Terence Harvey, an officer specializing in “perversion cases,” who was so successful in his patrols that he single-handedly caught a third of the city’s gay sex offenders in the first half of 1921.²⁹Chauncey p. 185. That these officers’ vice-suppressing desires stirred enough blood to actually heat the loins insinuates the peculiarly close proximity, at least among some men, of repulsion to horniness.

Perhaps the use of the past tense in this review of vigilantism is tenuous. The Port Authority Police Department didn’t agree to permanently halt undercover patrols of the bus terminal’s urinals until June 2022.³⁰Troy Closson, Ashley Wong, “Port Authority Settlement Will End Undercover Bathroom Patrols.” The New York Times (2022). Nevertheless, in the latter half of the twentieth century, as gay sex became less offensive, or at least more defiant, the tearoom finally found a candider counterpart: the gay bathhouse. The New York Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor opened the city’s first public bath in 1852, according to Chauncey.³¹Chauncey p. 208. As indoor plumbing assumed a more egalitarian distribution in the 1930s, public bathhouses gave way to private ones styled after Russian, Turkish, and Roman spas. These in turn gave way to establishments whose patrons most competitively (and desperately) sought secluded, labyrinthine sanitariums where naked men could wander, lave, and rub shoulders.

What started as a sanitary necessity for masses of showerless tenement home dwellers culminated in a sexual paradise. As early as the 1920s, discreetly gay bathhouses offered homosexuals an unprecedented locus of reciprocal sex. “Many men who came out before there were any gay baths looked down on having sex with other gay men. They had learned to prefer ‘servicing’ straight men in semipublic places,” wrote Allan Bérubé in his seminal essay on the subject. “The bathhouses, thus, are partly responsible for this major change in the sexual behavior and self-acceptance of gay men.”³²Bérubé p. 38.

As gay bathhouses lured men away from incidentally cruisy alternatives (like the eminently orgiastic showers at the city’s YCMAs), they gradually adopted characteristics of the gay wilderness outside their walls, just as pet owners furnish cages with arboreal bits and pieces to simulate a primordial habitat. Bérubé’s essay traces the intriguing transference of external miasmas into their recreational simulacra within bathhouses in the 1970s: “Glory holes recreated the toilets. Mazes recreated park bushes and undergrowth. Steam rooms and gyms recreated the YMCA and video rooms recreated the balconies and back rows of movie theaters. Cells recreated and transformed the environment of prisons and jails, where generations of gay men have ended up for risking sex.”³³Bérubé p. 40.

So curated were these ecosystems at their peak that they even hosted entertainers, most famously – and this is a treasured artifact of bathhouse historians across the nation – Bette Midler, or “Bathhouse Betty,” who, with Barry Manilow as her accompanist, regaled towel-clad men³⁴Sam Davies, “Sex, disco and fish on acid: how Continental Baths became the world’s most influential gay club” The Guardian (2018). at Continental Baths in 1971 with songs and salty jokes about gay sex.³⁵“Bette Midler – Continental Baths Concert (1971).” YouTube. As early as the 1950s, celebrities
like the hunky ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and the writer Lincoln Kirstein could be seen lounging at baths in Midtown. In an interview with Kaiser, the novelist Walter Clemons described an establishment near Columbus Circle: “Once in the afternoon, Truman Capote entered and I quickly left. I didn’t know Truman Capote, but I didn’t want to be in the same baths with him.”³⁶Kaiser p. 119.

The only celebrities you yourself have spotted in the steam room are porn stars. Even so, they seem to sensationalize fellow patrons. A few months ago, a scrawny, well-endowed steamer, with whom you occasionally fool around, frenziedly peered into your locker room aisle and told you to hurry up and undress – it seemed a first-rate OnlyFans performer was doling himself out in the steam room like Halloween candy. You personally were most starstruck the time you followed a modelesque young man into the steam room and determined, thanks to the large letters tattooed across his back (“PARAGUAY”), that he was a major studio star whose videos you frequented. And how edifying it was to sample him in the flesh: a conflux of titillation, ego boost, and disenchantment (brought about by his oddly puckered kisses).

Your gym happens to be a short sashay from what once upon a time were the most popular bathhouses in downtown Manhattan: St. Marks Baths, Lafayette Baths, and The Club (where our sociologically captivated Rita Mae Brown dodged erections and
wandering hands). The art historian Jackson Davidow recently summed up an average day at St. Marks Baths in 1977: “Once buzzed in through a heavy security door, clients were able to access lockers to change clothes, and then navigate the labyrinth-like corridors of cubicles, where they could endlessly cruise, wandering up and down the hallways in search of sex and other forms of erotic contact: a smile, a wink, a grope. If a man had a private room (rudimentarily equipped with a raised platform bed, sheets, pillow, and wall hook), he would leave the door open to invite in passersby. Social codes signaled what clients wanted sexually; a man lying on his stomach wanted to ‘bottom,’ while a man sitting up wished to ‘top.’”³⁷Jackson Davidow, “Where to Have Sex in an Epidemic.” Urban Omnibus (2021).

Even before the AIDS epidemic brought that “most libertine period” to its deathly close, perils were plenteous. Same-sex sodomy wasn’t federally legalized until 2002, and the specter of police raids loomed over gay bathhouses almost as acutely as that of entrapment tormented tearooms. Bérubé’s accounts of bathhouse busts in San Francisco and Toronto throughout the twentieth century include violence, terror, even death. Men were lined up in towels or fully naked, sometimes by the showers, sometimes outside on the streets. Their genitals were examined. Their names were printed in newspapers. They were imprisoned. They lost jobs and reputations. Some men committed suicide.³⁸Bérubé pp. 34, 43.

In 1985, New York State took aim at gay bathhouses, under the banner of AIDS prevention, by incriminating establishments that permitted “high risk sexual activity” such as “anal intercourse and fellatio.”³⁹Maurice Carroll, “State Permits Closing of Bathhouses to Cut AIDS.” The New York Times (1985). The city’s gay intelligentsia never quite reached a consensus about the merits of these closures. Some thought the bathhouses could have been highly useful proselytizers of safe sex. Others found the unfettered breeding to nakedly evidence their hazards. The year that the new regulations went into effect, playwright and activist Larry Kramer told the Columbia Spectator that bathhouses “were useful in their day, but now they’re filled with death.”⁴⁰O’Patrick Wilson, “St. Mark’s bathhouse tries to play it safe.” Columbia Spectator (1985).

The AIDS crisis, as it happened, didn’t just kill thousands of homosexual men in New York City. It was also deployed by politicians to snuff out battle-weary centers of gay congregation, reinvigorate homophobia, and galvanize the gentrification that had long been impeded by dens of vice.

Decades before Rudolph Giuliani took up residence as oddball jester of the alt-right, he was the more sinister, more efficacious mayor of New York City. For nostalgists, activists, and progressives, Giuliani was a grim reaper whose scythe wrought artistic displacement, corporatization, and all the euphemistic variations of “family-friendliness” a homosexual could imagine. For others, including many of the elder New Yorkers with whom you consort at bars and bookshops – elders who romanticize neither the aesthetic backdrop of crime nor specific memories of murder and assault – Giuliani was a brash but necessary janitorial martinet whose fee was joylessness. Either way, in the early 90s, he proudly brought to fruition a long-simmering melange of zoning initiatives, not to mention a deal with the Walt Disney Company, that bled Times Square (and other hubs) of sex, drugs, and hooliganism.⁴¹Charles V. Bagli, “Mayor Claims Credit for Times Sq. Revival.” The New York Times (2000).

As Giuliani synopsized in 2007: “It happened based on a very well-organized campaign, a study demonstrating the impact of pornography on neighborhoods, an intense battle in court that nobody thought we would win, and we won. And most importantly, the pornographers lost and they were chased out of Times Square.” ⁴²Rudy Giuliani, “Remarks at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit in Washington, D.C.” The American Presidency Project (2007). Any college freshman studying human rights, ethics, the philosophy of history, or dear old godlorn Nietzsche quickly realizes that progress is either cyclical, chimerical, or a ball of tangled string. Thence, just as seditious sex in YMCAs and subway stations slowly tapered off in the 60s and 70s, the end of gay bathhouses brought about yet another era of scrappy public profligacy: behind casually half-drawn shower curtains, reflected in gym mirrors, at urinals, in
saunas, in steam rooms, anywhere worms could peep out from under their rocks without being snatched up in the talons of vice-gobbling vultures.

Even digital life – coeval with the preventable lethality of HIV – which jolted cruising into postmodern utilitarianism, hasn’t supplanted public sex. As if the inventively committed pageantry that Davidow described at St. Marks Baths could’ve fully
disappeared from the public! Your own appetite certainly oversteps the bounds of Grindr’s emporium, which somehow pinions subversive promiscuity even as it expedites sex. Perhaps this is because, at the end of the day, Grindr isn’t truly anonymous. It filters the homosexual’s archetypal “love of strangers” through the prism of circumspect small talk. Nor is Grindr’s gratification immediate. Its textual overtures can be tediously mechanized; one must chat, plan, then travel (or wait). And rarely is its dominion public.

Thus we return to that cardinal precept unfogged by your voyages through the steam room: the imperishable thrill of immediate, analog transgression, destined to remain a rudiment of gay sex until gays colonize another planet. Here on earth, it may never be
fully possible to neatly sort genders while controlling for sexual deviance. The women you’ve befriended at your gym assure you they’ve never once seen a slip of impropriety in their own locker room. Trans men, trans women, and gender-nonconforming people are often excluded from premises such as these to begin with. Yet, within sternly segregated spaces to which the ever-minoritarian homosexual man gains access, sex assuredly will forever be stolen. Advantage will be taken. Yes, there is less public space than there used to be. Less interclass contact. More neoliberal gloss. Less risk. Central Park’s Ramble today crawls with straight couples smoking weed and feeding geese. Gone are the grunge and danger that once incubated cruising. Still, older men in tank tops lurk behind trees and murmur overtures of fellatio. They find their wilderness and mystery wherever they can: the warm breeze, the trickling stream, the crunching of boots, the scent of sweat, the locking of eyes, that sweet rush of blood to the crotch. And won’t these, alongside Mother Promiscuity herself, outlive machines and reforms? In his 1999 bipartite portrait of gentrification, Times Square Red,
Times Square Blue, Samuel R. Delany remembered the cultural ritualism of the now-shuttered gay theaters: “My current lover (with whom I’ve lived happily for going on seven [years]), once we’d met, discovered we’d both patronized the Capri, only we’d never encountered each other because I usually went in the day, while he always went at night. Once we began to live with one another, we often visited the theater together – till it was closed, toward the start of this year.”⁴³Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (2001). New York University Press. p. 16.

The gym’s steam room isn’t a cultural center in this way. Couples don’t usually lounge conjointly the way they might visit the theater or go out to dinner. Partners might be seen stroking each other here and there, but most of the steam room’s ritualists are atomized, their rites concealed in guises of salubrious relaxation and underwritten by a monthly fee of $180.

“Given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will,” Delany wrote, a paean to the endangered sex public.⁴⁴Delany p. 111.

He was right, of course, as was Michael Bullock, years later, in his essay about the international exhibition series, Cruising Pavilion: “Institutionalization can feel like a death knell.”⁴⁵Michael Bullock, “Cruising Pavilion considers the Architecture of Queer Sex, from Grindr to Glory Holes.” PIN-UP 27 (2019). The steam room wouldn’t be half as fun if it were intended just for gay sex, partly because there’d be no such artful gavottes between hedonism and modesty, exposure and evasion, and partly because its incidentalism would be tamed into something too preordained to squeeze into anotherwise unsexual routine.

But even if much of present-day cruising is no political cudgel, no vanguard of subversion, is it not still poignantly queer? Does it not at least count as real life? Surely there is some existential liberation to be found even in extravagances that are staid, theatrical, or vestigial, just as those elder statesmen humping in The Ramble continue to find their wilderness.

Harvesting joy from your own version of the gay hunt seems to blunt the nihilism of cascading sanitization just as much as reading history and mobilizing political opposition. And in fogbound chambers at gyms across the nation, the air remains thick with heirlooms of queer pleasure, free of charge for voluptuaries who can intuit the rules and play the game.

At last, you and the beauty finish. He exhales profoundly and slumps against the wall. Smiling slightly, you wipe yourself off, walk out of the room, shower, dress, and ascend into the public – flushed, slaked, freed for a few moments from the vast deviations of your secret world. ~