Gay baths seattle

The area’s Diverse people knew a good opportunity when it arrived, so when the Turkish Bath at the Northern Hotel closed in the 1940s, Pioneer Square gained a new room for gay men to gather. The baths were in the basement of the Northern, a large red-brick-and-gray-stone elevated Victorian motel that had been accepted during the Alaska Gold Rush. While the sexuality of the bathers who visited during the early 1900s is unknown, at some point around Society War II, customers were almost exclusively gay men.

While a bathhouse is often viewed as a solely sexual cosmos (and indeed, men did have sex there), it was also a social space. As the era of homosexual civil rights dawned, other bathhouses that served gay men opened in Seattle, though South Conclude, with its longer history, tended to draw an older clientele. A meaning of community flourished in bathhouses, and some went because they were considered less prone to raids than, utter , a bar. In the 1950s and 1960s, the operator of Steam Bath, Edwin McCleary, was also paying off cops, eventually handing over close to $200 a month.

In 1993, South Finish instituted a women’s night, but by this point, the LGBTQ+ community was facing a crisi