PRIDE 🏳️🌈: Gay Bathhouses from My Personal Memories of the 1970s
Reflecting on the period of time when it felt so free to be gay
In a previous PRIDE 🏳️🌈 essay, I talked about the changes taking place early in my gay life during the 1970s. Those were the beginning of “good times” when it felt like a new freedom had arrived for us. One of those new freedoms was the “Freedom of Gay Sex!” The Stonewall Inn Riots took place in 1969. My personal memories come from pre-HIV/AIDS, which began to be noticed in the early 1980s.
A brief history of public bathhouses
By the late 1800s, personal cleanliness had become a cultural norm for Americans, necessary for social acceptance, symbolic of good character, and essential for protecting public health from infectious diseases.
Without bathing facilities in their homes, the urban poor and working class could not conform to this cleanliness standard. During the Progressive era, reformers urged city governments to build public baths for the poor. Chicago’s government responded by building 21 small, utilitarian public bathhouses in poor and immigrant…
