A Brief History of Bathhouses
- Al Preston
- Jan 28
- 10 min read
By Al Preston
WARNING: This blog post will talk about sex and sexual organs bluntly.
There’s a very tight connection between queerness and sexual desire. For a long time, culturally and socially, being queer was seen as the same as other kinks. Often times, bestiality and gay sex (that’s sex between two penis owners), were legally under the same umbrella. It’s important to describe why that is and why it matters and what this view results in.
We must first take off our 2026 shaped mindset. Despite how it may feel or appear, people from the same places but from very different time periods have vastly different ways of viewing the world and cultural systems. Sex, the biological action, is one of those things.
Consider this. A good portion of us today see sex has a more fluid thing that is recreational, for pleasure, fun, or for procreation, or all of the above. We have a more friendly view of sex and how it should look and be like. What it means to have that intimacy and trust broken. Who can have sex, how to have sex with different sex organs.
While there are still limits and judgements placed on sex and sex acts, there’s a lot fewer legal repercussions for things like kink. Or even sex before marriage!
So, we have to ask, how was it viewed before? Well, for many sex was a means to an end. Children were workers, they were the future. They were needed and wanted. Sex was also very pleasurable and enjoyable. If someone was rich enough, they could ignore the resulting children and just have fun.
The most important thing, especially in the US, is that sex, good ol’ approvable ‘normal’ sex was between a vagina and a penis. Anything outside of that, including oral sex, was ‘abnormal’. Sex had a particular purpose and anything outside of that purpose was extreme, unnecessary, or strange. To get even stricter, sex should only be between married couples (those who could get married were men and women).
With a very basic definition of sex, it’s easy to see how penis on penis sex could fall under the same umbrella as bestiality. There are sources, books written by ‘sexologists’ studying specifically abnormal sexual habits. They clearly break down ‘abnormal’ sex into different kinds with different levels of severity. However, legally, they were all punishable the same way.
Basically, being queer was only sex. It was only penises and vaginas meeting sexually. There was nothing romantic about it. Sex was physical only. There was no questioning if the two men bumping dicks wanted to do so because they loved each other or because they really liked sex. Of course, those things aren’t mutually exclusive to queer folks, but back then they very well could be.
Love and sex overlap and can knot themselves together throughout time and in everyone who feels and wants them. Love isn’t always necessary for sex. Arranged marriages are lucky to also include love. There, sex is often mostly functional although love can come into the mix. That is, however, in the case of ‘normal’ relationships and sex situations.
Strict definitions of what something is often prevents other definitions and interpretations from becoming widespread. Even among those who are gay, there is an internal struggle to accept that love, attraction, and sex are all intermingled. Many gays and lesbians believed that while they crave breasts, vaginas, and penises when they shouldn’t, they will eventually love and crave sex with who they ‘should’ want.
To put it more bluntly; in the past, sex and love are intermingled in a very particular way. Love, which involves sex eventually, is reserved for men and women who are married. Sex, while fundamental to love, can also stand on its own and that isn’t necessarily a good thing.
This kind of view of queerness has led to this belief that to be gay, having lots and lots and lots of sex is a requirement. It also doesn’t help that the catalyst moment that eventually led to the gay rights movement was the hippie, free love movement. Which was mostly focused on drugs, sex, and having fun.
Of course queer folks hopped on the free love train. Sex is their main accusation for being strange and ‘abnormal’. Any movement that encouraged free sex and love would be appealing, even if the straight members of the movement weren’t overly pleased with the inclusion of LGBT+ folks (you can hear about that in select oral histories on the Making Gay History website).
All of this created an image of queer people being obsessed with sex. To be fair, it wasn’t fully just an image. For a vast majority of the population, sex is great and fun so it’s hard to blame them. However, all of that leads to two of the biggest places where queer folks could find each other outside of bars.
Bathhouses and sex-based bookstores.
Due to AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), bathhouses have faded pretty significantly. I’m sure we can all figure out what happens at a bathhouse. What I’m sure less people know, especially if they’ve never been, is that bathhouses aren’t just about sex.
I know I lead up to this talking all about sex, but this notion that queerness is equal to sex comes from outside of the community. There is some truth to it, sex plays a huge part in the lives of many queer folks, but the community has always been about more than just sex.
Outside of bars, bathhouses were another place where gays, specifically men, could feel free to be themselves. They’re almost less complicated than bars, where there’s alcohol, clothes, perceptions, and small talk. Physically speaking, bathhouses require significantly less and can still have alcohol involved if you came right from a bar. They could be cheaper than a bar and they can be just as…platonic.
While many went for sex and orgies were common, you don’t have to. Especially if you don’t find yourself interested in anyone else at the house. Not to mention they were places that welcomed queer related news and media. Without fear of information being destroyed, queer organizations could have their publications, news, flyers, and travel guides sitting out for any bathhouse patron to pick up and keep.
When a community’s gathering places are limited and for specific things (IE, sex and drinking) you make do. Many queer folks picked up the guides to the city they were in or to other bathhouses, bars, and restaurants in the nation at bathhouses.
Bathhouses were often run by and for gay folks. As such, they wanted to support the community they were apart of as much as possible. For many, many years, to come out as gay to your family, either on purpose or on accident would instantly lead to being disowned, just about 90% of the time. So, bathhouses would host holiday dinners, mostly Christmas the Thanksgiving.
Some bathhouses and bookstores would allow activist groups to use their buildings on off hours to meet and organize. Closing down bathhouses, as many conservatives wanted to do, wouldn’t just close a place where gay men could meet and have sex. They would close down meeting places for LGBT+ organizations, preventing them from organizing and gathering numbers. The vast majority of those closures occurred during the AIDS crisis.
There are some arguments that can be in bad faith when it comes to the closure of bathhouses during AIDS. Many, many bathhouses protested the closure of their doors during AIDS despite many of the men who became sick with AIDS most likely getting it from going to bathhouses. Meanwhile, public officials just wanted bathhouses done away with. Some health professionals wanted them gone because they were a health nightmare while others wanted to work with them to spread information. The handling of AIDS was an absolute nightmare on all fronts.
Many health professionals wanted bathhouses to close just until they could contain or better understand the disease. There are more than two sides of this situation. The bathhouse owners who didn’t want to lose their funds and establishments in the unknowable amount of time it would take to understand AIDS, not to mention the lack luster response from governments and activists to AIDS. There was so much misinformation and dismissals of AIDS, its existence, and how dangerous it actually was that it would be difficult to willfully close doors for something that may or may not exist.
While there were many bad actors who wanted bathhouses to close on ‘moral’ and religious grounds, professionals in the health field wanted to save lives. To their discredit, no one with power was going to put their neck out to offer monetary support to bathhouses during this time.
There were government officials who wanted bathhouses to close forever and took the opportunity when it presented itself. However, there is always more nuance to a situation than just bad faith actors. Health professionals knew, for some time at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, that it was spread sexually. They were prevented from telling people that, prevented from exploring that, prevented from creating the data needed to prove it due to homophobic researchers not caring, government officials thinking it was better for gay men to die, and a terrible lack of funds.
When health professionals tried their best to tell bathhouses what they knew, they were ignored. When they wanted to use bathhouses to spread information about AIDS, some bathhouse owners thought it would hurt business. Some did take on those health professionals, and their patrons were better for it. They could spread true information about AIDS, and it’s spread easily and widely.
No one had the foresight to know they should have listened, some lucked out, some didn’t. There was no way, at the time, that the bathhouse owners or the health professionals to know how bad AIDS would become. That even just pressing gay men to wear condoms could have saved a lot of lives. Or just knowing that you can have AIDS and be spreading it for a really long time before symptoms appear could have saved lives. We know it did in some places, where bathhouses allowed health information to be spread.
AIDS was a tragedy because no one with power cared about gay men and, to all appearances, it seemed like the conservatives were trying to just shut down a queer space without consideration for all that they do for the community. In a better world, the bathhouses would have been closed only temporarily until doctors, with money and dedication, figured out how the disease was spread and what it could do to people. Those bathhouses would be financially compensated and reopened once everyone knew how to avoid getting or spreading AIDS.
That’s not what happened, but it could have. Other diseases, when they infected cisgender and straight people, were treated this way. Any business harmed by the spread of a disease would be financially compensated until the disease was figured out and could be handled by health professionals. Just for one example, Legionnaires’ disease gets it name from the 1976 outbreak that occurred during an American Legion convention. Once convention goers started getting seriously ill, they were quarantined and rapidly studied to understand what was happening to them and how to stop it. Only 29 people died thanks to the rapid response from medical professionals. It also wasn’t spread further than the convention.
Tragedy led to bad actors taking advantage. It’s a very simplistic view to see the closure of bathhouses during AIDS as positive or negative alone. It’s complicated, as everything in history is. There are many sides to a story, and we have to acknowledge them all to form our own opinions on the matter.
I view things as realistically as I can…what was anyone supposed to do? It was a lose-lose situation no matter what choice people made. In a better world, AIDS would have never killed as many people as it did. Bathhouses could be part of the solution by being supported in temporary closing or being hubs for trustworthy information. Doctors and government officials would have cared more about the human lives at stake than their personal vendettas or pride. Alas, the world is not perfect. We just have to find the many ways different groups handled the situation, because nothing is so simple or collectively the same.
To put us back on topic however, bathhouses have a long history. Public bathing has been a thing for thousands of years. The Greeks and Romans had public bathhouses where everyone would go to meet and get clean. We can obviously speculate that sex occurred in these places as well.
Other cultures have had bathhouses for centuries as well, like Japan, India, colonial America and just about every other civilization. Before significant plumbing, it was the easiest way to get clean, especially if that was something that culture valued.
Let’s take a quick look at what records exist about gays in bathhouses. In 1492 in Florence Italy, there was a court case ordering bathhouse owners to keep out suspicious boys which coincided with the Muslim city Granada in Spain ordering that all public bathhouses be closed to stop gay sex.
In 1876, six men (ages 14-22) in Paris were charged with public decency violations and the owners of the bathhouse they were charged with ‘facilitating pederasty’.
Then, in America, the Ariston Hotel Baths were the first recorded bathhouse to be raided for queer activity in 1903.
Now, gay bathhouses, specifically, started popping up within a similar pattern from the 1860s. Men would gather to clean and talk, sometimes having sex if the manager of the bathhouse would look the other way. Some bathhouses became known for this kind of thing and so more and more gay men would go to those bathhouses to cruse or have an alternative spot to have sex with someone they met at a bar or cruising elsewhere.
By the 1920s and 30s, there were gay specific bathhouses where sex was allowed in private rooms. It was a dangerous endeavor because the owners themselves risked arrest when vice squads showed up to raid their businesses. It wasn’t until the 60s and 70s that bathhouses had a bit more wiggle room, seeing as how the sexual liberation movement (which dawned thanks to better methods of birth control) was gearing up.
The 1950s created the groundwork for the sexual liberation movement, as—according to some sources—gay soldiers were returning from war and wanted a safe, private space to meet up with their old war buddies.
In the modern day, there are a few bathhouses left, but much like gay bars, they’re fading into history. Technology is usually blamed for this, as it’s easier to find someone online and go to a hotel or your own home to have sex. With the rhetoric of the sexual liberation mellowing out alongside more acceptance for queer folks, plus the way technology has made just about every generation struggle socially, there’s less interest in going to bathhouses and bars and more interest in curating lifelong relationships of any kind.
It’s also important to note that bathhouses were mostly for gay men. There are few records of bathhouses for lesbians. I’m sure there were some that existed in some way, but I think it’s a bit socially and physically difficult for women to go to something like a bathhouse. Sexism and misogyny make it difficult for women to have that kind of freedom.
To my memory, I can’t recall many lesbians talking about going to bathhouses recreationally in oral histories. I also haven’t read or listened to every oral history that exists. It’s just far more likely for men to have the ability to go to bathhouses and have sex in them.
This is a relatively brief history and understanding of bathhouses. I recommend any of the sources at the end of this post to learn far more!
Sources:
And The Band Played On by Randy Shilts
Making Gay History Podcast
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