The Gershwins’ Bathhouse: Pleasure, Perversion & the Technologies of Sexual Life During the 1893-1929 Era by David Rosen Too much of a good thing can be wonderful. Mae West1 Gershwins’ bathhouse backroom, movie theatre, washroom or comfort station (i.e., “tearoom”); and at a One of the most notorious venues for social gathering and an invitation-only homosexual assignations during the WW-I party. One could say that illicit -- if not era was the Lafayette Baths, located at illegal -- sex was taking place nearly 403–405 Lafayette Street just south of anywhere people could discreetly meet.3 Cooper Square in what is today’s New York’s East Village. The Lafayette was Bathhouses like the Lafayette were a one of a handful of bathhouses that unique sexual venue. The historian catered to an exclusively gay -- and George Chauncey notes, bathhouses mostly white -- clientele, providing a safe “constituted a singular gay environment.”4 environment for sexual encounters as well First and foremost, men came to meet as other forms of socializing. In addition, other men for explicitly physical, if not there were still other baths that overtly sexual, purposes. In catered to a mixed male New York, there were only a heterosexual-homosexual handful of such establishments clientele and tolerated discreet and they tended to serve an sexual encounters. However, affluent, white clientele. And what distinguishes the Lafayette when they met, the men were from the other popular either naked or modestly bathhouses is that on December clothed, making explicit what 29, 1916, the Gershwin family under most public conditions took over its ownership and Ira would have remained and George Gershwin, whose concealed. Equally critical for father was in the bathhouse this clientele, these discreet business, became its managers; settings allowed them to feel at the time, Ira was age 20 and relatively safe from public George was 18.*2 harassment or police arrest. In New York and other cities during this In addition to the Lafayette, other gay period, men and, more infrequently, baths of the era included the Ariston women appropriated a wide variety of Baths (on West 55th Street), the Everard social venues to facilitate homoerotic (on West 28th Street), the Mount Morris liaisons. Such encounters took place in Baths (at Madison Avenue at 125th the privacy of a bathhouse; in an Street), the Penn Post Baths (on West 31st apartment or rented hotel room; in a Street), the Produce Exchange Baths (at 6 tenement basement, stairwell and Broadway) and the St. Mark’s Bath (on St. rooftop; in the civil space of public park, Mark’s Place near Third Avenue). Among deserted street, dock or beach; in the the gay-tolerant baths were the YMCA, the quasi-public venue of a saloon’s Claridge and Stauch’s (on Stillwell Avenue near Coney Island, Brooklyn).5 * George and Ira Gershwin, 1928; Brooklyn College, CUNY. Sex Matters Gershwins’ Bathhouse As one might expect, the men who visited needs. Contemporaneous to this effort, bathhouses engaged in a range of sexual local ethnic, fraternal and religious acts, including fellatio and sodomy. Some organizations as well as commercial seemed to have participated in more entities set up similar bathing facilities. In radical forms of engagement – group and time, some of these operations catered to “public” sex. Chauncey describes an a decidedly gay constituency.8 encounter that took place during the early-20th century in the dormitory and “The baths were also important social cooling rooms of the Ariston Bathhouse: centers, where gay men could meet openly, discuss their lives, and build a Men crowded into the room looking for circle of friends,” Chauncey astutely partners, and one investigator testified that he recognizes. What makes this venue so saw almost two dozen sexual encounters in the important is that it was – and still is -- an room over the course of two hours, with at explicitly sexual terrain of social least one involving more than two men. engagement. Not unlike traditional -- and Although there were no lights in the room, it was partially illuminated by the light of the now nearly extinct -- heterosexual gaslights in the next-door parlor, which brothels and contemporary sex clubs, streamed in through the open door. bathhouses remain a unique cultural Voyeurism and exhibitionism were an venue of self-expression, for the important part of the sexual excitement in the experience of pleasure and the forging of resulting light and shadow: one officer testified community. There, as Chauncey notes, that two men had sex while he stood less that men “created a social world on the basis a foot away from them, and that another eight of a shared and marginalized sexuality.”9 or so men observed the pair while standing against the walls or lying on cots.6 Fin-de-siècle America A decade later Thomas Painter, a future associate to the Kinsey study of male The thirty-five year period that spans the period from the 1893 Chicago World’s sexuality, described a visit to Stauch’s, a mixed male bathhouse in Coney Island: Colombian Exposition to the 1929 Great “The more direct homosexual expression Depression represents one of the most is reserved for the steam rooms. There, socially disruptive – and sexually in an atmosphere murky with steam – so traumatic -- eras in American history. During this period, the U.S. made its first- murky, indeed, that one cannot see more than a few feet ahead – with benches blush steps to become not merely a around the walls, fellation and pedication modern nation, but an international power as well. It was a period in which the are not at all uncommon. …” Innocently, he adds: “If one stumbles over a pair in country underwent a final, continent-wide the act, one mutters a hasty apology and transformation from a rural agricultural 7 country to an urban industrial nation. The goes on quickly in another direction.” Bathhouses constituted a unique sexual U.S. population not only more than culture. doubled, but was simultaneously recast and restructured. It was recast from a As the irony of history would have it, relatively homogenous white Anglo- American people -- with the enforced these bathhouses grew out a half-century- long movement of socially minded, concentration of the descendants of progressive reformers seeking to better former African slaves in the South and Native people in the West -- into a the life of immigrants and the poor. Given the poor quality of sanitary conditions and heterogeneous multiethnic citizenry. And limited in-apartment toilets and baths, it was restructured from a rural and small- th town country to a class-structured, many municipalities during the late-19 and early-20th centuries built sex- industrial urban nation. These changes segregated public baths to meet people’s forced the nation to face it’s fiercest and most sustained battle over moral order – © David Rosen, 2016 page 2 Sex Matters Gershwins’ Bathhouse a battle in which those advocating more following the WW II – and from which tolerance and greater freedom for sexual there would be no going back. difference and expression were repeatedly thwarted if not momentarily contained. The U.S. was remade between 1893 and 1929. Looking simply at population, in This period can be distinguished by three the forty years between 1890 and 1930, phases, each defined by a number of the U.S. population nearly doubled to over struggles over sexual practice and 123 million from 63 million. As the expression, and each marked by a nation’s population grew, its composition definitive social or political outcome that changed and increasingly concentrated in imposed tougher restrictions on the efforts cities. For example, in 1890, 65 percent to practice and/or express greater sexual of the population lived in rural areas and freedom. The first phase is often referred 35 percent were urban dwellers; by 1930, to as the Progressive Era and took place this balance had been fully recast, with 56 between 1893 and 1910. The period percent now urban and 44 percent rural witnessed the nation besieged by reports inhabitants.10 As the nation’s population of widespread “white slavery,” the grew and its composition changed, an interstate transportation of girls and ever-increasing proportion concentrated in women for the purpose of commercial sex. cities. This transformation was most The outcome of this effort led to the vividly reflected in the major cites. By passage of the 1910 Mann Act. The 1920, for example, the foreign born second period lasted from 1910 and 1919, population of New York, Chicago and and witnessed an enormous change in the Detroit constituted, respectively, 36.1, make up of America’s cities due to the 29.9 and 29.3 percent of the total combined forces of domestic migration population.11 These changes radically and foreign immigration, especially transformed the nation’s character. involving the mixing of different races. The outcome of this phase led to the This profound transformation of the passage of the Volstead Act (1919) nation’s population and urban imposing abstinence. The third phase, concentration was driven by the between 1920 and 1929, witnessed fundamental realignment of the nation’s Prohibition -- the “Roaring ‘20s” -- and the economic order. From a rural, agrarian playing out of the failures of a peculiar country, the U.S. became one of the socio-economic experiment. This phase world’s mightiest industrial nations. From culminated in the unraveling of world a country of yeoman farmers to a nation capitalism and, in particular the U.S. of industrial workers, America became a economy, due to the Great Depression. truly modern society. It was a modernity embodied in the increasing widespread During the period from 1929 to 1945, adoption of technologically innovations.