[URBAN NOTE] "A new reality for Toronto’s bathhouses"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Laura Armstrong reports on the thriving Canadian gay bathhouse scene.

Bathhouses date back to the Roman Empire, initially built to maintain hygiene in major cities. By the late 1950s and ’60s, as the need for a public place to wash up declined, bathhouses began drawing crowds by offering a discreet place for gay men to meet and have sex in a time when sodomy was still a crime. Bathhouses saw their heyday in the 1970s, before being vilified in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic.

Today, bathhouses face new challenges. The rising acceptance of homosexuality and the growing number of gay dating websites and hook-up apps are endangering the once-booming businesses.

The Associated Press reported earlier this year that Damron, the publisher of an annual gay travel guide, found the number of bathhouses across the U.S. dropped from nearly 200 in the late 1970s to about 90 by 1990. In the last decade, the number of bathhouses nationwide dropped to 70 following closures in San Diego, Syracuse, Seattle and San Antonio.

[. . .]

The city’s big-name bathhouses, [Spa Excess president and director Robert Knight] said, still see a lot of business, as do locations in other Canadians cities. The difference between bathhouses in Toronto and some of the ones facing closure in the United States is hospitality, Knight said.

“Typically, (American) owners put just enough money in to take money out. It’s not every bathhouse, but many don’t offer decent customer service,” Knight said. “A lot of them are seedy. A lot of them have been taken over by drug dealers and users.”