My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History

4. Resorts for Sex Perverts: A History of Gay Bathhouses

Resorts for Sex Perverts A History of Gay Bathhouses As the aids epidemic worsened and the sexual politics it provoked intensified, Bérubé devoted himself to historical research that was specifically sexual in its focus. The result was this intervention in the public policy debates about how to respond to the epidemic. Based on another innovative slide lecture and first published in a San Francisco gay newspaper in the immediate wake of the city’s closure of gay bathhouses, the article builds on and extends the thematic concerns of the previous two essays. In it, Bérubé describes gay male sexuality and the places where it could be expressed as forms and sites of resistance. Sexual expression became a route to the creation of community, and the bathhouses proved to be key locations where this happened over time. Arguing that, in the past, attempts at repression have failed, he calls instead for more creative solutions that make use of gay male spaces like bathhouses to educate the community about safer sex practices. One of his more popular pieces, it has been reprinted and revised a number of times, as debates about gay male sexuality and aids continued into the 1990s and beyond. For centuries, society has stigmatized homosexual men and women as sinners , criminals, and diseased because of their sexuality. Baths and bars were the first institutions in the United States that contradicted these stigmas and gave gay Americans a sense of pride in themselves and their sexuality. As such, gay bars and baths are an integral part of gay political history. Before there were any openly gay or lesbian leaders, political clubs, books, films, newspapers, businesses, neighborhoods, churches, or legally recognized gay rights, several generations of pioneers spontaneously created gay bathhouses and lesbian and gay bars. These men and women risked arrest, jail sentences, loss of families, loss of jobs, beatings, murders, and the humiliation that could lead to suicide in order to transform public bars and bathhouses into zones where it was safe to be gay. In a nation which has for Originally published as “The History of Gay Bathhouses,” Coming Up!, December 1984, 15–19. This version comes from the Journal of Homosexuality 44, no. 3/4 (2003): 33–53. 4 chapter • • • • • • • • • • • • 68 : a community historian generations mobilized its institutions toward making gay people invisible, illegal, isolated, ignorant, and silent, gay baths and bars became the first stages of a movement of civil rights for gay people in the United States. For the gay community, gay bathhouses represent a major success in a century-long political struggle to overcome isolation and develop a sense of community and pride in their sexuality, to gain their right to sexual privacy, to win their right to associate with each other in public, and to create “safety zones” where gay men could be sexual and affectionate with each other with a minimal threat of violence, blackmail, loss of employment, arrest, imprisonment , and humiliation. Early History of Gay Bathhouses in the United States The transformation of Turkish baths, Russian baths, public baths, health resorts, and spas into gay institutions began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States. In California as in other states, all sex acts between men were illegal as “crimes against nature.” Thus, men having sex with each other had no legal right to privacy. Records of California state appeals court cases around the turn of the century contain many cases of men who were arrested after landlords, housekeepers, neighbors, Title slide for Bérubé’s lecture “Resorts for Sex Perverts.” Courtesy of the Allan Bérubé Collection at the glbths, San Francisco. a history of gay bathhouses : 69 policemen, and ymca janitors drilled tiny holes in walls; peeped through keyholes, transoms, and windows; or broke down doors to discover men having sex with each other. Because all sex acts between men were considered public and illegal, gay men were forced to become sexual outlaws. They became experts at stealing moments of privacy and at finding the cracks in society where they could meet and not get caught. These “cracks in society” expanded as the rapidly growing cities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created more and more public places where men could be anonymous and intimate with each other. These included public parks at night; certain streets and alleys; empty boxcars in train yards; remote areas of beaches; ymca rooms...