The commercialised gay sauna is an invention of the post-war sexual revolution, as well as an integral – albeit not uncontroversial – part of and symbol of modern gay culture. It is regarded not only as a place where physical intimacy is shared, but also where individual and collective queer identities have been – and continue to be – formed. Historical evidence shows, however, that saunas and baths fulfilled similar functions in many earlier eras, and that this tradition dates back to antiquity.
Roman baths as the precursors to the gay sauna
In ancient Rome, public baths – also known as thermae – were not only places for personal hygiene, but above all important centres of social life. People would meet there to discuss the latest taxes, politics and the empire’s military campaigns whilst bathing. The thermae were highly diverse, not only in terms of their architecture and the facilities available within them – such as pools of cold and warm water, dry and steam baths, and relaxation rooms – but also in terms of their clientele. There were baths for patricians and plebeians (the upper class and everyone else), separate baths for women and slaves, and Rome’s wealthiest citizens often owned their own private baths, which were impressive for their splendour.
The classical scholar Asa Eger wrote about Roman baths as queer spaces. In the surviving historical accounts and literary works, he found evidence that sexual advances between men took place in these venues. For instance, in Titus Petronius’s *Satyricon*, one of the characters, Eumolp, seduces his friend’s son in a bathhouse in Pergamon. In his treatise *On the Happy Life*, Seneca the Younger, in turn, praises the hottest and darkest rooms of the baths, where one could seek the company of other men. It is also striking that some baths decorated their rooms with suggestive, erotic or even pornographic frescoes. They were also frequently built in the immediate vicinity of brothels. One example of this is the suburban baths in Pompeii.
Roman sexuality: different from our modern categories
It is worth noting that the Romans had a completely different attitude to sex and sexuality from the one we have today. For example, no distinction was made between „heterosexual“ and „homosexual“ sex. Of paramount importance was the position one occupied within the social hierarchy of the Roman state. This, in turn, determined which forms of sex were acceptable and which were not. Adult Roman citizens enjoyed full rights, including sexual rights; provided they took the penetrating role during sexual intercourse, they were permitted to have sex not only with women but also with a younger man or even a boy, with a foreigner, a sex worker or a slave.
Eger describes the Roman baths as „queer“ spaces, not only because they were a place for sex between men, but also because it was possible there to subvert traditional gender roles as well as social norms and hierarchies. In a society where clothing and physical appearance (e.g. beard growth) provided clues as to a man’s age, social status and role in sexual intercourse, nudity placed all bathers on an equal footing and enabled potentially intimate encounters that would have been frowned upon or forbidden outside the baths.
Ottoman Hammams and European Fantasies
The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest in history and is the predecessor of modern-day Turkey. The Ottomans developed their own form of bathhouse, known as hammams. In addition to their hygienic and social significance, they also served an important religious function, as they were used as places for ritual ablutions. Architect Burkay Pasin examined them as queer spaces in his doctoral thesis.
The researcher points out that, in the European imagination and culture – which was shaped by Orientalist fantasies, myths and oversimplifications – the hammam functioned for centuries as a highly sexualised space. A recurring motif can already be observed in 16th-century European travel literature and, above all, in 19th-century French painting: naked figures, not infrequently also white (i.e. European) women relaxing together in the hammam. The mere fact that a man would not have been allowed into the women’s hammam proves that this is nothing more than a fantasy.
Hammams as places where men meet
However, even the Ottomans themselves often held on to the notion of the hammam as a place for casual sex, although this mainly involved encounters between men. Pasina refers to classic studies on Ottoman hammams in which occasional homosexual practices are mentioned. These are said, however, to have been confined to baths frequented by people from the lower social classes. The hammams in the city of Bursa, in particular, are said to have had a bad reputation.
Homosexual behaviour was associated primarily with the staff and masseurs at the hammam, the so-called tellak, were associated with this. They were often portrayed as young, delicate and effeminate men. Some of them earned a little extra money by offering sexual services. This phenomenon was already described in 1686 in the book with the telling title Dellakname-i Dilküşa („The Heart-rending Book of the Masseurs“). Allusions to sex between men recur frequently in classical Ottoman literature. In the 16th century, there was even a distinct genre of poetry intended to extol the beauty of male bodies whilst bathing (hammamiye).
The emergence of modern cruising culture
In modern times, rapid population growth and the unchecked influx of people from the countryside into the cities, combined with widespread poverty, posed a challenge for local authorities. Only a few particularly wealthy individuals could afford the luxury of their own bathroom, whilst the majority of the population used the public bathhouses that were being built on a massive scale at the time, most of which were accessible free of charge or for a small fee.
In the 19th century, urbanisation fundamentally transformed life in the cities. Traditional rural communities declined in importance, anonymity increased in the rapidly growing cities, and religious and moral standards became more relaxed. This created new opportunities for anonymous, casual sex in public places – a practice that came to be known as „cruising“ amongst men.
New York, Paris and the regulation of public baths
George Chauncey described this phenomenon in his book Gay New York This is vividly illustrated by the example of New York. At the end of the 19th century, the city had a disproportionately large number of single men due to the influx of cheap, international labour and overpopulation. As they were forced to share a flat or even a room with strangers, they began to satisfy their sexual needs in public places – often with other men.
The best evidence of the popularity of public baths as venues for sex between men is provided by reports of police raids on these establishments. For example, in 1876 the police raided the Parisian bathhouse Gym Baths which was notorious for the debauchery taking place there, and arrested six men and youths aged between 14 and 22. They were charged with indecency, whilst the manager and two employees of the baths were charged with „promoting pederasty”. A similar raid took place in New York in 1903, when the police stormed the Ariston Hotel Baths on a Saturday evening in February. At the time, 78 men were present; 34 of them were arrested and at least 16 were charged with „sodomy“.
Scandals in Vienna, Munich and Budapest
Such scandals also occurred in German-speaking countries. The setting for one of them was the Vienna Central-Bad (now known as the „Kaiserbründl“), which still exists today; a regular visitor there was the younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph, Archduke Ludwig Viktor, was a regular visitor; in 1904, he was slapped in the face whilst attempting to make advances towards a man.
Another scandal took place in February 1909 at the Maximilians-Hofbad in Munich. According to reports, rumours had been circulating for years „here and there in Munich“ that things at the establishment were „not entirely above board, and that the male social elite, in particular, frequented the place for certain reasons“. On the third floor of the baths, which remained off-limits to uninitiated guests, there are said to have been veritable orgies in which, amongst others, high-ranking officers and members of princely houses took part. The complaint was lodged by a newly hired employee, but the owner, Max Reininger, managed to cover up the scandal and have the court rule that he was supposedly unaware of the events.
The trial could not go beyond the finding „that, whilst indecent touching and acts had indeed taken place at the Hofbad between the bath attendants and some bathers, these were not punishable offences“. The whole matter came to nothing. Visitors to the Lukasbad public steam bath in Budapest were less fortunate: at least ten of them were sentenced in January 1910 to fifteen days„ imprisonment each “for offences against public decency”.
In the early 1930s, however, a whole host of self-righteous moralists warned that fornication was rife in bathhouses. Franz Scott, for instance, raised the alarm that two women would often rent a separate room with a bath in order to use their shared bath as an opportunity for intimate contact. Heinz Dalberg also pointed out that prostitution took place in many bathhouses and that, allegedly, there was nothing „one could not have – trained female and male staff are available for every kind of perversion“.
The modern gay sauna
Although gay saunas also existed in the decades that followed, they experienced their real boom in the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the sexual revolution and the gay and lesbian emancipation movement. In the West, their operation was generally associated with greater freedom, though not everywhere. For example, in 1981 in Toronto, there was a series of coordinated raids on four gay saunas, which were operating under the cover name Operation Soap („Operation Soap“) and resulted in the arrest of 300 men. This does not, however, mean that there were no such places in the Eastern Bloc, even if they functioned only unofficially as meeting places. One example of this is the municipal baths on Teatralny Square in Wrocław (Breslau), which feature in Michał Witkowski’s semi-autobiographical novel Lubiewo have been immortalised as a queer place.
Nevertheless, the culture of gay saunas – and, by extension, the entire queer culture – suffered a severe blow in the 1980s with the outbreak of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Ultimately, gay saunas in particular were demonised as „hotspots“, leading to the closure of many of these venues and the withdrawal of some of the clientele from the gay scene. The moral panic associated with the pandemic persisted for a long time, well into the late 1990s, and in some places even longer.
For this reason, many saunas are now heavily involved in prevention and awareness-raising work. Leaflets, information boards, free condoms and lubricants, and in some cases even psychological support, are now standard features in saunas. There is no shortage of challenges: Alongside old and new (MPox) STIs and dealing with the use of illegal substances in the context of chemsex, the experiences of discrimination faced by many queer people are a very pressing topic for discussion. Above all, racism and unrealistic, harmful body ideals sometimes prevent the gay sauna from becoming the Safer Space will be what she promises to be.
Bibliography:
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York City: Basic Books, 1994.
Dalberg, Heinz. Behind Closed Doors: A Factual Report. Leipzig: Lipsia-Verlag, 1932.
Eger, Asa. “Age and Male Sexuality: ‘Queer Space’ in the Roman Bathhouse?”. In Age and Ageing in the Roman Empire, *Journal of Roman Archaeology*, 2007.
Halperin, David. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York City: Routledge, 1990.
Higgs, David. Queer Sites: Gay Urban Histories since 1600. London: Routledge, 1999.
„Materials“, WhK Quarterly Reports I, Issue 3, April 1910.
Neuhold, Helmut. The Other Habsburg: Homoeroticism in the Austrian Imperial Family. Marburg: Tectum, 2008.
Pasin, Burkay. A Critical Reading of the Ottoman-Turkish Hamam as a Queered Space, PhD thesis, Middle East Technical University, 2014.
Scott, Franz. The Lesbian Woman: An Exploration of Counter-Sexual Female Eroticism. Berlin: Pergamon-Verlag, 1933.
Setterington, Ken. Righting Canada’s Wrongs: The LGBT Purge and the Fight for Equal Rights in Canada. Toronto: Lorimer, 2022.
Witkowski, Michał. Lubiewo. Kraków: Ha!art, 2005.
