What’s in a Name

Abstract

Built originally at the turn of the century to serve the personal hygiene needs of urban populations in major U.S. cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco at a time when most households lacked a private bath (only one in forty families in the densely populated tenement district of New York’s Lower East Side lived in an apartment with a bathroom then; Chauncey 1994 208), bathhouses would become, according to historian George Chauncey, “[t]he safest, most enduring, and one of the most affirmative of the settings in which gay men gathered in the first half of the twentieth century” (207). Although there was vigilance of homosexual activity in these bathhouses, many either tolerated discrete homosexual behavior or protected it from harassment and persecution by the police. By the 1930s and 1940s “baths that did not cater to gay men had begun to decline in number and popularity as indoor plumbing and private bathing facilities became more widely available,” Chauncey explains (217). And after World War II, baths would cater almost exclusively to homosexually inclined men. In these bathhouses, gay men would build environments that were safe and affirmative of homosexual practices and cultural expressions.