Gay bathhouse honolulu

When the late lgbtq+ activist Rick Stokes founded the Steamworks bathhouse chain in Berkeley, California, in 1976, the earth was a unlike place. Though queer saunas were given licences in many North American jurisdictions in the 1960s and ’70s, they were still at risk of group outrage and raids by the police. Men frequented them anyway—there was no internet and many of the other ways to pursue sexual encounters, appreciate blind dates and park cruising, were even riskier.

At the industry’s peak in the 1970s, the United States had nearly 200 bathhouses, according to numbers from gay commute guide Damron. One former chain, Club Baths, operated an estimated 42 locations in the U.S. and Canada. By 1990, fewer than half of America’s bathhouses remained, at least partly because they were unfairly alleged to be hotbeds of unsafe sex during the 1980s HIV/AIDS epidemic. San Francisco, for example, closed its bathhouses down in 1984 because of fears about the spread of HIV/AIDS. But bathhouses remained an important part of gay male life in many metropolitan cities—Steamworks itself continued to unlock new locations right into the preliminary 2000s.

In recent years, the decline of bathhouses in male