Steaming the “Nefarious Sin”: Bathhouses and Homosexuality from the Victorian Era to the AIDS Epidemic

Commemorative Sex Series: Episode 3 of 4. When and where public baths have been popular, they’ve meant different things to different cultures. They might be sites for socializing, religious purification, spiritual/bodily cleanliness, relaxation/pampering, public health/hygiene, homosocialiality, and, of course, sex, or some combination of those things. At the start of the twentieth century, single-gender communal bathhouses were central to emerging gay communities all over North America and Europe. At the end of the century, those sites of community formation were associated with the rapid and devastating spread of HIV/AIDS. In 1984, the city of San Francisco ordered the closure of bathhouses, insisting that often anonymous and unsafe sex was at the heart of the bathhouse. But the closure of the gay bathhouses in AIDS-era America echoes the closure and backlash against queer bathhouse spaces in places like early twentieth-century Russia and Mexico. The bathhouse was a contested space because of its same-sex sexual activity, with or without the threat of the looming pandemic. For a complete transcript and bibliography, visit digpodcast.org

Selected Bibliography

Allab Berube, My Desire for History ,(University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 

Ed. by Chris Bull, While the World Sleeps: Writing from the First Twenty Years of the Global AIDS Plague (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003). 

Dan Healy, Russian Homophobia: From Stalin to Sochi, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

Victor M. Macias-Gonzalez, Masculinity and Sexuality in Modern Mexico, (University of New Mexicao, 2012).

Ethan Pollock, Without the Banya we Would Perish, (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Philip Tiemeyer, Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants (University of California Press, 2013).

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