Gay Saunas from Around the World

Steamy! Gay French Riviera: Sauna Sun House (formerly Le Block) http://t.co/VV02z7u5v4 #gay #bathhouse

Simon, whose relationship just ended because his boyfriend told him that he wasn't adventurous enough, goes to one of the bath houses in London to explore hi...

I'm not a big fan of the whole "converting" thing - but I figured it was worth giving it a try. Can you make a straight guy go gay? Phil Fusco facebook - htt...

Last month, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica discovered that the Vatican had paid $35 million for an apartment block housing the Europa Multiclub, which calls itself the “number-one gay sauna in Italy.” The media used the story as another example of the Catholic Church being so obviously gay that they should just come on out and admit it. As a former Catholic schoolboy who believed in God till I saw Hugh Jackman in The Boy from Oz, a Broadway musical about Liza Minnelli’s first gay husband, I wasn’t surprised. I remember my school’s baseball coach sexually assaulting students and my first-grade teaching assistant nearly losing her job after she had an alleged lesbian make-out session with a PE coach—Catholics and shady sex shenanigans go together like red wine and wafers.

 

Naturally, when I visited Rome recently, the Multiclub was on my sightseeing list,

Via Gracie Passette

But uptown, there was a place where gay men, at least, were treated like kings: the Continental Bath & Health Club at 74th and Broadway. Steve Ostrow, Brooklyn-born and dreaming of a career as an opera singer, was married—to a woman—when he opened the Continental. He’d pioneered interstate loans by mail, which led to his being charged with mail fraud. Although the case against him was eventually dropped, he spent seven years with “the federal thing” hanging over his head. Unable to operate his finance company or take singing jobs overseas, he looked for something closer to home. When a friend suggested that he invest in a gay bathhouse, Ostrow and his wife staked out a rival business. Standing outside the Everard Baths—described in the 1971 edition of The Gay Insider as having “scabby walls, [a] rancid pool and putrid-smelling steam room”—they saw 60 men entering every hour, day and night.

A play by Paul J Guest Directed by Dan Phillips 3 July 1937 - writer Christopher Isherwood takes his friend, the composer Benjamin Britten, then just 24, to the Jermyn Street Bathhouse to get drunk and have fun. There they meet Isherwood’s old...

The Vatican has raised a few eyebrows with news that it has bought into a building that also houses what is thought to be Europe's largest gay sauna.