Course:CSIS200/2024/Sites of Queer Revolution: the Bathhouse

Page Bio: In my analysis of each of the sources used in this project, I made sure never to skip the author's dedication. Whether it was a paper, book, interview, or video diary—I looked for the creator's messages to the people who had inspired what I was reading. Those who had been lost to anti-queer violence, institutional neglect, or community isolation; those who resisted and fought and struggled. I will continue to try my best to acknowledge and honour their sacrifice, and I hope that as you read the words that their labour produced, you think of them.

Introduction

Bathhouses transformed sexuality within the spatial of traditional sites of cultural, social, and hygiene practice. These spaces re-imagined the identity of pleasure and desire, celebrating the sexual experiences and explorations of sexually marginalized bodies. Early gay bathhouses were “oases of freedom and homosexual camaraderie…. and one of the first identifiable gay social and sexual institutions.” (Bérubé, Allan) This essay aims to explore the context of transformation, focusing on changing political, economic, social and sexual landscapes as they relate to the development of bathhouses as queer spaces.

Babylonia Bathhouse, pictured.

An important pretext for this work is the discussion of the limitations of “spatial sexuality”. The arrangements of bathhouses, in theory, suggest themselves as spaces where sexuality is liberated – but can paradoxically discipline gendered and sexualized identities through deployment of a particular definition of ‘queer’. “For instance, while findings reveal the potentially empowering impact PP has on some individuals, the bathhouse simultaneously enforces a conformity of desire and erotic action that belies the apparent agency inherent in the setting”. Sex that is interacted with in an establishment functioning under institutions of capitalism and normativity is weighted with their imposition. (Nash, Catherine. J., and Bain, Alison. L) A space can be revolutionary and limiting, but we should not neglect this duality.

Political and Urban History

Public bathhouses catering primarily to a male homosexual audience were established as early as 1902 but only emerged as the subject of mainstream fascination and protest in the much later part of the century.

The criminalization of sex between men forced those active in the gay sexual community to become “sexual outlaws.” Sexual privacy was sought in the “cracks of society: public parks at night; empty boxcars in train yards; remote areas of beaches; shower stalls; and public restrooms in department stores.” (Bérubé, Allan) Bathhouses began to quietly facilitate sexual practice; some of the first baths ‘designed’ open to sexual patrons provided designated closed and locked cubicles on premise for sexual activity. The establishment of these bathhouses, and similar spaces, is significant for both progressive social movement and “an expression of capitalist efficiency as applied to sexuality.” (Tewksbury, Richard) This is also emphasized in the absence of public sexual space for queer women: who have historically held significantly less economic power or prospect.

1970's Northwestern University gay liberation group attended the anti-Vietnam war demonstration in Washington, DC.

Political campaigns against the establishment of public sites for queer sexual practice developed alongside the spaces themselves. These campaigns involved the conduction of raids, often called “anti-vice drives clean-up campaigns,” or “morals drives.” Raids were solicited by politicians and performed by organized anti-homosexual groups and agents of the state, including regional and military police, state liquor agents, district attorneys and police. Bathhouses were often the target of these campaigns; their capacity to assemble and organizations deemed a threat. The observations of undercover police officers who had posed as patrons were also commonly used to hold establishments in contempt. These campaigns resulted in a population of gay refugees, patrons who had been forced to relocate after arrest. An arrest meant being publicly condemned and often evicted from families, professional spheres and social communities. These raids also encouraged political transformation within bathhouses, active political engagement by patrons and the function of the space to facilitate political education, organization and lobbying.  

Gath Bathhouse Mixer -- Taken at White House, Washington, D.C.

Campaigns were justified by three political goals: preventing homosexual men and women from meeting and socializing, eliminating sex between men in public and private, and fundamentally driving homosexuals out of urban areas. Once political parties had reached their intended goal, these campaigns would dissipate and remain dormant until it would next be useful for them to be employed. Between cycles, gay baths and bars were tolerated by police departments as practical solutions to law enforcement problems, such as public sex.

Towards the late 1960s, public opinion began to shift towards support of queer spaces and away from the raid tactics of police. A pragmatic approach to ending raids, soothing protests by anti-homosexual citizens and public officials, began to gain popularity in cities. Summarized by a San Francisco (CA) District Attorney, it was decidedly better  “to have homosexuals in one resort rather than spread throughout the city,” and allow bars and bathhouses to operate.

Liberation Movements

The social contract conceives homo­sexuality as a privileging of individual plea­sure over social responsibility. “The social contract pits the idea of a selfish individual seeking only his or her gratification against the “public good” (Robcis, 245), where the public corresponds to a social order taken to be founded on heterosexual filiation.” (Young, Damon) Homosexuality is problematized not necessarily when it comes into social consciousness, “but when it lays claim to the institutions that make sexuality socially meaningful.” Desire and pleasure are experiences that can be conceptualized as “sexual institutions” that play a primary role in the maintenance of male sexual dominance. Sex is conceptualized based on the capacity to facilitate experiences of male pleasure, and thus, claims of a different way to partake in sex are viewed as a challenge to the foundations of social order.

Photograph still from Gay Sex in the 70s (2005) (AUDIO-VISUAL)

[1] Gay Sex in the 70s (2005): VISUAL COMPONENT (30:30-35:00) (3:04-604)

Liberation movements of the 1970s challenged normative sexual cultures of sex by centring homosexual dynamics and experiences in social dialogue. “More than anything, the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s was a pro­cess by which that which was ‘hidden and withdrawn’ became ‘open, revealed, or accessible.’” (Weintraub, Jeff) Making sex public in the 70s meant reimagining the sexual contract that sexual conduct was written with; “In the case of queerness, the historical transformation designated by the phrase “making sex public” is even more stark: this period witnessed the transformation of a regime of the closet, in which homo­sexuality could barely be alluded to, into one of increasing, and increasingly acceptable, explicitness.”

Sexual heteronormativity privatizes sexual culture, assigning private sexual practices with a finite sense of right and “barricading the building of non-normative or explicit public sexual culture.” (Berlant, Lauren and Warner, Michael) The revolutionization of public sex was also entirely necessary for the establishment of private, non-normative sexual practice.

Spatial Politics

Spatial exclusion isolates queer people from accessing the identity and community they have formed in and around space. “To retain their place in the family, the church, and the community, they would need to conform.” Many did, sacrificing their identity so they would be recognized by those they love and allowed to exist in the spaces that had shaped them. But many queer people didn’t, “those who refused to see themselves as sick, who failed in their attempts to pass themselves off as straight, or who decided that the pain caused by suppression and deception was worse than the punishment they would receive if the truth came out—were forced to find new homes.” (Thomas, June)

Photograph still from Gay Sex in the 70s (2005) (AUDIO-VISUAL)

“They created a… community by living in certain neighborhoods, operating businesses, by meeting in bars… by inventing fests and celebrations; in short by organizing socially, culturally and politically,” (Castells, Manuel) through space.”

Bathhouses are an example of a space that has been redefined: the relationship between space and sexuality was revolutionized by changing the way spaces are organized. Sexuality is autonomous, not ruled by the imposed expectations of the space, but instead ruling what creates the culture and function of the space. Traditional organization of sex and sexual space “rests upon gender, obligatory heterosexuality, and the constraint of female sexuality.” (Rubin, Gayle) Spaces are not naturally authentically “straight” but are actively heterosexualized through the imposition of social norms and behaviours within the establishment. “The suppression of the homosexual component of human sexuality, and by corollary, the oppression of homosexuals,” is “a product” of the same systems of organization. (Rubin, Gayle)

Bathhouses enable the visibility of sexual subcultures that, even in their very existence, resist the impositions of hegemonic heterosexuality that are the source of their marginalization. The presence of queer bodies in sexual spaces makes their absence noticeable: forcing people to reflect on the reproductions of heteronormativity and the assumptions of heterosexuality within the spaces they occupy.

Narratives of AIDS

"AIDS is both a personal tragedy for those who contract the syndrome and a calamity for the gay community. Homophobes have gleefully hastened to turn this tragedy against its victims." (Rubin, Gayle) The AIDS crisis was both a public health epidemic and a catalyst epidemic in the queer diaspora. Queer people were systemically alienated and exiled from societal resources and support, meaning they were barricaded from diagnosis and treatment healthcare, education about safe sex practice and space to organize community response.

"The threat of HIV was (and is) real and deadly. But the epidemic was also seized on as an instrument of control by assimilationists within the queer community who wanted us all to behave like good girls and by those in the larger heterocentrism culture who were both envious of and repelled by men who numbered their sex partners in the dozens. Or hundreds. Or thousands." (Sheppard, Simon)

Making an AIDS memorial quilt panel on behalf of Associated Students, Inc. (ASI) Fresno State 1994

"Gay Sluts Are Back," is a piece by self-described "gay slut" Simon Sheppard, published as a part of a 2002 Pride issue of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, celebrates the renascence of promiscuity amongst the Bay Area queer community. His work reflects the aftermath of placing responsibility for the epidemic on the sexual practices of the queer community and the weaponization of tragedy to advance homophobia.

1993 HBO film adaptation of "And the Band Played On", based on the late Randy Shilts’s 1987 book about the AIDS epidemic, featured journalistic frames of text summarizing aspects of the epidemic that the film had focused on. One frame begins, “San Francisco’s gay bathhouses were closed in 1985.” While there was an order in 1984 to close baths, most businesses and patrons defied it. (Disman, Christopher) Admitting defeat to these spaces, the focus shifted from bathhouses to the city's sex clubs. This example of the emphasis on bathhouses as a site of spread reiterates the ideas spoken about in Sheppard's piece; that the epidemic was used as a means of uprooting spaces for queer sex, and the strategy of public health institutions reflected this. Bathhouses were essential sites of information and education around sexual health and transmission, offering peer-to-peer teachers that did not alienate, stigmatize or carry the same fear of status as outside education. They saved countless lives, and have continued to provide destigmatizing peer-care and create open-status conversation--but were ignored in crisis strategy because of their sexualized identity.

JP Hornick - Pussy Palace Toronto Interviewee

Queer Women and Pleasure

“Christian and Cartesian precedents viewed the body as associated with all things negative – sin, irrationality, emotion and nature, all of which were located in, and represented by, the female body. Women’s bodies were thus to be controlled and tamed, while men’s rationality and logic would lead the way out of darkness, toward civilization and ‘progress.”

Pussy Palace events are organized political projects that challenge preconceived ideas about women’s gendered and sexualized selves through the process of “‘reclaiming raunch’”. (Nash, Catherine. J., and Bain, Alison. L). This reclaiming is intended to undo “inflexible and restrictive” constructions of women’s sexuality that assume an inability to experience the full range of sexual and gender expression. “A sliver of light beneath doors suggests occupancy; and the occasional gasp or moan of pleasure confirms it.” (Nash, Catherine. J., and Bain, Alison. L). Queer sexuality is brought to the forefront of conversation and spatial experience.

[2] PUSSY PALACE QUEERSTORY (AUDIO-VISUAL)

The "Sexuality Papers: male sexuality and the social control of women" (Coveney, Lal) examines how expectations of sexuality and sexual practice reflect and reproduce male supremacy. In childhood, men are socialized to seek power, while women are encouraged to submit to power. Learning is reinforced over time; behaviour compliant with gender-assigned norms of dominance or submission is rewarded, and deviation is punished. Sexuality develops to adhere to these same behavioural principles, resulting in the naturalization of sexuality, expression and practice that only exist, and can only exist, under male supremacy. “Male identity and sexuality, as long as they are bound up with power, cannot but have a damaging effect on those who stand in a relationship of relative powerlessness.” (Coveney, Lal)

Pussy Palace answers the question of what decentering male sexuality and, instead, ‘queering’ pleasure would look like as a spatial practice. The September 14th, 2000, police raid of the space captures the extent of resistence by male supremacy to the organization of women's sexual autonomy. Patrons interact with the influences of politics and power on the “stylized acts or performances” that they find sexually familiar and construct their “internalized ideas about the self and subjectivity,” which may lead them to feel discomfort in a space designed to limit them. (Nash, Catherine. J., and Bain, Alison. L)