Guys- this is both educational and entertaining

[AlwaysOpen]

I was doing something online yesterday and ended up Googling MansCountry ( for the young ones, it was a bathhouse of great fame in Chicago)  Among the results that came up,there was a YouTube link I followed and I will put the link at the end of this post ( pre approved by a mod, btw) Anyway- I watched the whole thing, 3 older gay men smoking cigars and talking. Recalling how things were in the 60's and 70's, how many of the rights and gains gay folk have today came with a lot of blood, a lot of persistence, and making " good trouble". I found the talk a great reminder for those of us who lived thru those days, and a good lesson for the younger guys coming out in the last 20 years of just how hard the fight was to get where gay people are today. 

Look, I have no ties to the YT page, I don't even know the 3 kinksters, tho at least one of them does have name recognition. But in the current political and social climate where so much of what has been won is just as easily close to being taken away, I thought it was one YT video worthy of all of us watching and remembering (or realizing for the first time)  how fragile the foundation we have been standing on is, and how some would love to destroy it, and in turn, all of us. 

The link

[think before following links] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyN7WeYU61M

 

[meetme]

I was part of a Man’s Country conversation here recently. I dug into its online history too. My first trip to Chicago a bathhouse/club had recently been closed. My second trip in 2009 there were only two bathhouses Mans Country and Steamworks. Now MC is also gone, it deteriorated brutally until 2017. The reviews were horrible to read, but in 2009, I enjoyed it. As owners of places like these age and pass, leaving no heirs, what takes their place? NY is down to one bathhouse.  Theyre a part of gay history and these places, once in deterioration, don’t get rescued.  Do we have enough sense of community to see new gay owners take over the difficult task of keeping these places open? 

[BootmanLA]

10 hours ago, meetme said:

I was part of a Man’s Country conversation here recently. I dug into its online history too. My first trip to Chicago a bathhouse/club had recently been closed. My second trip in 2009 there were only two bathhouses Mans Country and Steamworks. Now MC is also gone, it deteriorated brutally until 2017. The reviews were horrible to read, but in 2009, I enjoyed it. As owners of places like these age and pass, leaving no heirs, what takes their place? NY is down to one bathhouse.  Theyre a part of gay history and these places, once in deterioration, don’t get rescued.  Do we have enough sense of community to see new gay owners take over the difficult task of keeping these places open? 

I think there's a much larger set of problems than a lack of a sense of community, although that's part of it (as I'll mention).

There was a time when the options for gay men's lives in the United States (and elsewhere, but I can't speak to conditions in other countries specifically) were very, very limited, even in large metropolitan areas. Although even bars got raided, gay bars were one of the handful of places where men could meet men like themselves; and for men who couldn't bring home another man for sex (whether because there was a wife at home, or mom and dad, or nosy neighbors or roommates, baths filled a niche need for a place to have a sexual outlet.

Out of necessity, more than anything else, gay bars and bathhouses became de facto community centers, because the idea of an actual community center, with resources available in broad daylight with highly visible public signage and internet ads and webpages detailing the services the center provides, was a pipe dream. The bars and baths took money from the community and gave back to the community; they WERE the community, in many places.

Once the gay rights movement took off, things began to shift (even as our advances were partially offset by losses). In the seventies, the bars and baths were making money hand over fist; the bars reacted by specializing in particular clienteles, the baths by competing on amenities and special attractions. Baths maintained the pretense of being "health clubs" where people worked out and enjoyed the sauna or steam room and where sex was just something "happened" (even when the weight machines never got touched), but actual sex clubs sprang up where there was no pretense at all.

But as states began repealing their sodomy laws, or even simply not enforcing them any more (de facto repeal), other venues began to arise: actual community centers, gay bookstores, gay coffee shops - places you could go to and meet other gay people without it having to be about sex or over alcohol, which had been sorely lacking, so competition for the gay dollar. (In smaller cities and towns, of course, the gay bar often remained the only social option, but we're talking about the places big enough to support bathhouses.)

Then HIV/AIDS came along, and whether it was prudent or effective to shut down the baths and sex clubs as a way to prevent the spread, that's what was done in a lot of places. Or they were restricted in ways that cut way into business. A lot of that went away, eventually, but a lot of those locations never recovered. Meanwhile, a lot of gays came of age where regular trips to the bathhouses were NOT part of their coming out, so the baths were no longer a cash machine, especially in cities where soaring real estate values made building rents skyrocket. So maintenance and improvements suffered, as owners were unwilling or unable to pony up the cash to keep the places up.

And at the same time, increasing acceptance of homosexuality meant fewer and fewer people HAD to go to the baths to have a place to fuck. That's not to say there isn't a transgressive appeal to the places - but the difference in volume of business between "almost everyone has to come to us for sex" and "people who really like indoor public sex with and in front of strangers come to us for sex" can be huge. So the places decline in terms of cleanliness and repair, which lessens the appeal for all but those who want a transgressive experience; which reduces the income stream further, which exacerbates the maintenance issue....

Factor in the losses of customers who actually died of HIV, and those who stopped having that kind of sex because it was deemed "risky".

And I'll throw this in, though I know it certainly doesn't apply in all cases: drug usage/"partying" in the gay community. Drug habits are expensive, and I know of any number of gay bar owners who developed a drug habit over the years that sucked up profits from even thriving bars. When bars in Louisiana were allowed to have 3 video poker machines each, back in the early 90's, the typical bar in any of the state's larger (relatively speaking) cities on average got about $5,000 per month per machine as the bar's cut (and remember, that's for doing nothing except letting the machines sit on your bar for customers to play). At least one owner I know had such a drug habit (and so many friends with drug habits) that when a state-ordered local option election forced the removal of the machines in his parish (county) after almost five years, he'd spent literally every dime of the nearly $1 million extra dollars the machines had put in his pocket, most of it up his and his friends' noses.

This isn't to say that all bathhouse owners were drug users - but for those who did partake (and I'm guessing it was a significant portion of them), that's a big drain on a cash engine that's already in decline. And as posts by some users here of late have indicated, the remaining places seem to be making stricter policies, removing amenities, and raising prices simultaneously - which might work for a product in high demand, but for one with already reduced appeal is probably a death sentence.

In an ideal world, of course, every major city would welcome gay bathhouses like any other business, and there would be enough patrons willing to pay a reasonable fee for access to support maintaining the place in a safe and appealing condition. But that's not the world in which we live.

Along the way, a lot of that role of "de facto community center" has been taken up by other institutions, not the least of which are actual community centers. You wouldn't know it from places like Texas or Florida, but public libraries - imagine! - in all sorts of places have LGBT resources often prominently on display. There are predominantly-LGBT groups in sports (gay rugby, gay softball, gay rodeo, you name it), entertainment (gay choruses, especially), hobbies (gay birders, of all things dear to my heart), and more. On the one hand, it's great that there are all these other options for interaction and reaching out and connecting the current generations of LGBT people with the incoming ones; and while I'm not opposed to drinking per se, I think the reduced emphasis on bars and alcohol as the center of gay connection is a good thing.

But on the other hand, the fractured nature of gay connectivity in any decent sized community means it's harder to create a sense of community for the whole. I can remember nights in the late 80's and early 90's, out in the bars in my home city, where you could count on seeing about 75% of the "out" LGBT people on any given Saturday night, just by going to the two larger bars in the city (and one of those two, I'll add, was only "larger" compared with the other couple of hole-in-the-wall joints). There's no longer any one place bringing people together that way on a weekly basis.

And as one final note: the internet, social media, "the apps". When you can interact with friends by texting - and thus have multiple conversations going - or entertain yourself by scrolling through Instagram or Twitter or TikTok or whatever, or search for sex partners or dates or relationships online, the actual need for places to interact "irl" (as the kids say) gets reduced (and yes, the concept of community further suffers, but that's another topic).

All of which is to say: I don't think anyone is going to step in and "save" the baths or even the bars - whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, I just don't think the money is really there, any more, to support them as thriving businesses as there once was. LGBT people born in, say, 2050 are going to be learning someday about the weird things their great-grandparents' brothers and sisters once did to interact with each other, and be totally mystified by it.

Just like pre-teens today have trouble understanding the notion of a rotary dial phone, or getting a phone call and having to answer it to know who was calling, and not being able to move very far from the spot in the room where the phone was hard-wired into a box on the wall. 

Or just like no one in my generation would understand the notion of going around the city leaving one's calling card at friends' houses, much less what "turning a corner" on the card meant.

[hntnhole]

23 hours ago, AlwaysOpen said:

I watched the whole thing, 3 older gay men smoking cigars and talking

A Thousand Thanks for sharing this, AlwaysOpen. 

Watching this video (which I had never heard of before) was like a trip down memory lane.  Remembering friends long gone, the marches, the struggles, and the eventual, hard-won victories.  The younger crowd seldom has a clue what some of us experienced in the early days of budding "Gay Lib".  

[hntnhole]

21 hours ago, meetme said:

Steamworks

Try as I might, I can't remember the original name of the bathhouse now called Steamworks (in Chicago).  I remember when it was opened, but under a different name, and it didn't last all that long.  

Anyone?

Edited August 4, 2023 by hntnhole

[hntnhole]

Since he didn't answer here in the thread, I'll only thank him obliquely.  Thanks, Mystery Man.  

Originally, it was the Unicorn.  

[FelchingPisser]

 

39 minutes ago, hntnhole said:

Since he didn't answer here in the thread, I'll only thank him obliquely.  Thanks, Mystery Man.  

Originally, it was the Unicorn.  

Well, if I was wrong, I didn't want it to be here forever.  I think I was there only once.  There was a neon Unicorn on the stairway wall going in.  

[partying.hard]

Chuck was a brilliant entrepreneur for the gay community.  I’ve been to all seven continents, and MC was the best bathhouse in the world. In fact, numerous times a year, I would fly from California to Chicago just to spend a long weekend there. Unfortunately, when Chuck died, his heirs had no interest in the business or the property. They wouldn’t even lease it out to someone to continue running it. Instead, they close the business. Many happy and nasty memories for many of us. 

[ErosWired]

5 hours ago, partying.hard said:

I’ve been to all seven continents, and MC was the best bathhouse in the world.

There’s a bathhouse in Antarctica? That actually wouldn’t surprise me - it’s just what you would expect from penguins. 

[AlwaysOpen]

Actually,  he wrote that he has BEEN to all 7 continents, not specifically to a bathhouse in every continent . But of the tubs he has been to, Mans Country was the best.

I can say I did Mans Country back in 1980 while in Chicago for a restaurant show. And then I went back in 2006 or so while in town for IML. At the window, the clerk asked if I had a membership ( they were for life) and  could not find my card at the counter. I just wanted in,and was ready and willing to buy a new membership- but he would not let me. He went up to the office and dug out 2 cards ,one mine, one another guy with the same last name, and was delighted when I confirmed one was mine. It was that type of customer care that made MC special. 

[ErosWired]

36 minutes ago, AlwaysOpen said:

Actually,  he wrote that he has BEEN to all 7 continents, not specifically to a bathhouse in every continent . But of the tubs he has been to, Mans Country was the best.

I did get that, actually. It just seemed a funny thing to declare when one of those continents obviously offers no bathhouses for comparison. (If you’re one of those guys who likes to plunge into frigid waters, however, Antarctica’s got you covered.)

[FelchingPisser]

16 hours ago, AlwaysOpen said:

I can say I did Mans Country back in 1980 while in Chicago for a restaurant show. And then I went back in 2006 or so while in town for IML. At the window, the clerk asked if I had a membership ( they were for life) and  could not find my card at the counter. I just wanted in,and was ready and willing to buy a new membership- but he would not let me. He went up to the office and dug out 2 cards ,one mine, one another guy with the same last name, and was delighted when I confirmed one was mine. It was that type of customer care that made MC special. 

I had a similar experience there, I hadn't thought of in years.  I had asked on my first exit from Man's Country if I there was a membership card--and was assured it would always be on file.  I went back for a second visit and told them my name.  The hunt for my membership card began.  "I have two with that surname.  Are you Robert?" 

I smiled and shook my head saying, "No, that's my brother."

The attendant smiled but didn't miss a beat.  He read out my name.

I nodded, paid and was ushered in. 

Later, the same clerk did not charge me for renewal time...

[atlboy]

I'm only 10 mins in right now (I was surprised to see the hot daddy from mormon boyz 🤤) but about you saying that it can be taken away...

I think they can take it away legally but not socially. I think we've just been too prominent for too long and people are too educated. Like the mormon boyz daddy said, when you came out in the 80s everyone thought you had a AIDS and would keep their distance. But everyone understands this stuff now, whether through 5 minutes of research on their phone or from their gay cousin who everyone basically has at least one of now.

[viking8x6]

1 hour ago, atlboy said:

about you saying that it can be taken away...

I think they can take it away legally but not socially. I think we've just been too prominent for too long and people are too educated.

I used to think that. I am no longer so sure. Part of this is informed by having moved to West Virginia about 6 years ago. I'm in a rather liberal small town (for WV), but I have literally been verbally heckled in derogatory gay slurs by teenagers here, and I'm not particularly gay acting or appearing. Mind you, these are people young enough to be my grandchildren.

The vitriol that has been spread so thickly by the ultra-right (authoritarians, fundamentalist Christians, and aggressively intolerant homophobic types) in the last decade, and has been amplified by the media and by social media, has the potential to do real damage. Don't forget that we (and our predecessors, to whom fervent thanks) changed societal mores by spreading our message. They can do the same.

[BootmanLA]

1 hour ago, viking8x6 said:

I used to think that. I am no longer so sure. Part of this is informed by having moved to West Virginia about 6 years ago. I'm in a rather liberal small town (for WV), but I have literally been verbally heckled in derogatory gay slurs by teenagers here, and I'm not particularly gay acting or appearing. Mind you, these are people young enough to be my grandchildren.

The vitriol that has been spread so thickly by the ultra-right (authoritarians, fundamentalist Christians, and aggressively intolerant homophobic types) in the last decade, and has been amplified by the media and by social media, has the potential to do real damage. Don't forget that we (and our predecessors, to whom fervent thanks) changed societal mores by spreading our message. They can do the same.

Also: I'd note that Americans are self-segregating into like-minded communities and states at an increasing pace.

One of the stories of America in the post-WWII era was the massive shift of people from rural areas and small towns to larger cities, even if just to the suburbs or exurbs. Coming into contact with an increasingly diverse society is part of what shifted America's social views to the left (a generally good thing, in my opinion). Even if the oldest people involved in such a move didn't change much, their kids and their grandkids did. So even traditionally red states began to shift purple-ish, as we saw with Colorado, Georgia and Arizona, and though it's less far along that process, Texas.

But there's a downside to that - many other formerly reddish states are becoming deep crimson, like West Virginia, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, and so forth. There just aren't enough progressive people moving to such places to shift anything, really. and the remaining red staters are resentful of the changes they're seeing and becoming even more vitriolic against gays, immigrants, liberals in general.

The media landscape changes - where you can pick your influences, rather than having the big three networks address the entire country - haven't helped. Mainstream news media was never the liberal bogeyman as painted by the right wing, but they were, more or less, uniform in their approaches. Now the right can largely insulate itself from contrary opinions both on TV and online. And with the massive decline in newspaper circulation, most people get only highly filtered news that conforms to their existing beliefs.

And then there's things like Florida's shift to the right. When 40 and 50 year old conservatives moved to places like Georgia and Arizona, they brought younger family members with them, and those children and grandchildren came of age in a very different environment. Florida's left tilt originally came from (over time) millions of northeast moderate to liberal people retiring to the Miami/Ft. Lauderdale/West Palm Beach corridor, but retirees don't generally bring their families (who have lives established for themselves) elsewhere. Once places like the Villages sprang up, catering to the same warm-weather retirement impulse but among red-state conservatives, that began tilting the state rightward.

Now we're at a point where most of the people moving to progressive places are other progressives, and many conservative families would rather wallow in the poverty and ignorance they know, in places like Alabama and Louisiana and West Virginia, rather than risk their kids getting a whiff of an actually diverse experience.

So not only are "they" spreading their own messages of what's acceptable and what's not, but they're making it harder for any other message to get through to the minds that matter.