[URBAN NOTE] "A Night at the Continental Baths"

[rfmcdonald]

_New York_ magazine recently republished on its website this article, by Richard Goldstein, recounting an evening spent at the Continental Baths in 1973, watching Bette Midler. It's an interesting period piece, not least because Goldstein apparently came out himself latter this decade. The last paragraph in this quoted section--"Even worse: what if I’m ignored?"--is diagnostic of the whole piece.

What to wear?

Nothing too inviting—I don’t want to be mistaken for David Bowie—and nothing too sedate—I don’t want to be mistaken for a salesman at the Harvard Coop. I settle for my lumberjack look: Bean Boots and a tight-fitting Western shirt over jeans which are baggy in the rear (I know, but they only cost me $3.98). At the Wrangler Wranch on Greenwich Avenue, they will not let you out of the dressing room if your seat is not snug in the saddle, and once I asked a clerk there why cowboys never have short arms, and he looked at my overhanging sleeves as though they were sanitary napkins.

Two friends have invited me along for an evening at the Continental Baths. The Baths is one of New York’s more ingenious hustles: a gay club during the week, and a discothèque on Saturday nights, when you can rent a cabana for $15, or roam the grounds for $5, to mingle or just to watch. I can think of less exploitative entertainments, and many gay people have come to spurn the Baths for its ambience as well as its cost. But the floor is crowded nightly, and at show time you are likely to find some of the most unusual entertainment anywhere—Lillian Roth singing “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” while Mick Jagger looks on. Scenes like that began to attract the curiosity of many straights. In response (and sensing, perhaps, that its gay clientele might provide just the draw a New York pop audience requires these days), the Baths began admitting straights on Saturday nights. It was a sure-fire formula for notoriety: and in the past year, the Baths has emerged as New York’s most Weimarian nightspot, a sort of City of Night à gogo, where straights may move among gay people without necessarily feeling gay.

We meet for dinner in the Village. My friends are wearing overalls and dirty leather jackets, which leaves me feeling overdressed and somewhat effete. We make our way uptown to the old Ansonia, part of that argyle axis which stretches from Cleopatra’s Needle to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, where the Ham & Eggs on Broadway and 72ndused to serve as a sort of leather Sardi’s. Not far from that landmark (now an asexual Blimpie Base, and onion-y at that), they have a blue door with a simple plaque announcing The Continental; shades of post-war Paris and Juliette Greco smoking under the gargoyles. You walk downstairs into a shapeless gymnasium. There is a swimming pool in the center of the room, and the entire place feels heated to the approximate temperature of a sauna at the Y. Except there are no tiles on the walls, and there’s a refreshment stand and potted plants and wicker swings and deck chairs and softly agile lighting and loud music and an Exercycle and weights and pulleys set into the corner of the room like props.

I’m sucked in, absorbed by the crowd, which is perhaps 95 per cent male, although the Continental welcomes ladies on Saturday night. They do seem a bit peripheral, though. Many come clinging to their men, like folks from Indiana hoping to be mugged as an experience. Others crouch politely by the bandstand, and a few dance, with none of the panache of the males, who are dressed for the most part in bath towels, fitted ever so snugly around the hips, so different from the way I look in a towel, all crusty like a dirty dish.

How exciting to be here tonight, to see without touching, stealing glances but feeling insulated by my own identity. This is 1973, year of the transvestite-father-of-six. It is okay to visit a gay bar now and then, just to see how the other tenth lives. Those of us who have been intrigued by Sunday, Bloody Sunday may even consider a brief foray into gay life without feeling stigmatized. Nevertheless, for me it is sufficiently threatening to warrant a certain apprehension. I do not believe heterosexuality is a “natural” state. Most people win their status as heterosexuals after profound inner struggles. Once achieved, that status is anything but invulnerable, and anyone who threatens it must be punished or rendered ridiculous. I don’t think the intensity of the threat which gay people pose to straights has diminished behind the new etiquette of tolerance, and why should it? How can I ignore the yearning mixed with dread which comes of watching someone spurn the very status which I have had to struggle to attain?

I hand my coat to an old black man who gives me a tag and a look of utter boredom. He doesn’t look gay. Nobody does. Mostly they look like me. Men in bath towels or overalls, or those baggy forties trousers where your basket doesn’t show. No one is exactly flaming here tonight, or at least there is little dazzle in the room, except for the persistent traces of the stimulant amyl nitrite hanging like vinegar in the air. Some men are in the nude, especially those grouped around the pool, and some are wearing their towels with little patches of buttock exposes. But I feel no sense of enticement, no ambience of the cruise on Central Park West where guys peer out of the shrubbery like leopards in a Val Lewton movie. Something inexplicably blasé about this audience makes me feel like a proper tourist, 6 a.m. in the peasant markets of La Paz, they’re bringing in freshly slaughtered llamas and you stand there, breathless from the altitude, feeling exotically out of touch.

We all take seats on the floor. It’s crowded—so crowed it’s impossible not to touch or be touched. My friend finds a lap and asks permission to install himself, which, when granted, he does. I’m vaguely pissed, and hope he isn’t going to abandon me. I have my own phobias to contend with: what if I am corralled into a back room by 30 men who want to do a Lawrence of Arabia on me? What if I wind up like that guy in Deliverance, without even the consolation of a canoe trip? Even worse: what if I’m ignored?