SEX CLUBS ARE A THING OF THE PAST, AND IT’S TIME THESE AGED OUT QUEENS LET GO. It may have been freeing and exhilarating in the 70′s and 80′s to have random sex, but nowadays we don’t have to.

I’m going to celebrate the end of gay sex clubs, when I no longer have to explain to my straight friend what’s going on in them.

It is absolutely amazing and horrifying. Is this what the “new generation” of gays is like? As soon as I hear “my husband…” I can’t but help to think we have some suburbanite matron talking, or at least a man who has surrendered something intrinsically male and bought hook, line and sinker into the hetero-style of life and love. And all the latent hysteria about STD’s repeated ad nauseam as if to echo the “god’s punishment” hypocrisy, and the moralizing about multiple partners as if it was unnatural (when in fact it was the norm and practiced in early human history), or the disparaging of anonymous sex as if that was also something against nature! OMG, these dears have been truly spoiled and brainwashed!

I half expect one of these self-centered, simplistic and inexperienced opinion givers to drag out the “AIDS is a homo disease and God’s punishment” line since they evidently think they live on a higher plain, safely removed from such dirty sex or human diseases! Especially ironic are the ones who would rather stay home and jerk off or live under some rock or in some fantasy fraught with disappointment and guilt that there is only one perfect, true partner, somewhere just waiting for Cinderella I suppose. Are these teenage girl princesses or monks removed from the real world?

I would not discount or criticize anyone for having personal preferences, but make them from experience and enlightenment, not imparted fear or disgust leading to moralizing statements that reek of judgements and condemnations. Many comments here sound like old washer women jealously or fearfully wagging their vengeful and gossiping tongues, in many cases about somethings not even dared to be experienced, it is worse than pathetic.

I hope these people really don’t think they are “gay,” but more likely just afflicted with homosexuality. You know, that “gay” gene that one is born with and simply has to suffer with! These people think the “natural” argument is simply an excuse for their affliction, instead of part of the great biological scheme of things enabling wonderful new experiences and lessons inherent for all our species. Maybe instead of mimicking and trying to be accepted as good but forever second class heterosexuals we should try to live without the hypocrisy of religion, at least the endlessly hateful monotheistic religions and remember that “marriage” was an institution designed for paternity and property claims, and candy-coated with Victorian sentimentality and guilt!

To be “gay” is to have an awareness, appreciation, identification and camaraderie with our vast community, its history, potential and worship of the graces of the male, the phallus and men’s society. (Lesbian are a parallel universe, but very different from men. Surely we should be allies, but never confused as the same!). And we should continually demonstrate and utilize our special talents of creativity, intellectual capacity, empathy and imagination, and in bringing the example to humankind that sex is a far more wonderful, manly pursuit and those that practice more of it more frequently with more partners are happier, more peaceful and long lived as the animal kingdom demonstrates but has always been ignored.

I started having frequent sex when I was five, with grown men when I was 11 or 12, lost my virginity when I was 14, and have enjoyed tens of thousands of partners all over the world. A wonderful, happy, prosperous life I would not trade for anything unless offered the chance to do it all again!

California laws requires the state of California to pay for the medical care of patients diagnosed with AIDS. California laws in this arena are based upon a compassionate perspective where patients would die without medical treatment. There is no cure for AIDS and without available medical care, the death rate for HIV-positive patients would skyrocket in a matter of months.

The cost to taxpayers for added new medical expenses for these 319 cases is approximately $13 million dollars per year. This means county and city officials must find an additional $13 million in their 2007 budget to cover this expense.

As a tax-paying citizen, I respectfully ask you to please use a condom.

Some guys insist that they want to make friends first, and fuck or not later on. If this is how you run your sex life, more power to you.

Most guys I know are more than happy to get their rocks off, one way or the other without going through the notions of ‘making friends’, listening to other people’s stories, and pretending that they find them and those stories, too, to be of any interest to them whatsoever. If you want to cut the drama, you know where you need to go to.

There are all kinds of sex clubs. Not all of them are creepy, dark, dirty, with a strong odor of fetish, leather, open asses and what not. Quite a few clubs are actually geared towards the next door dudes into vanilla sex.

Internet dating may have reduced the number of patrons frequenting the clubs, spas, ABSs. Amateur porn has dented into the profits of the major porn producers, too. Yet, the life goes on.

Not everyone feels like e-mailing, texting and calling for a short eternity, all in order to stand around and wait endlessly for the next fake/flake or whoever shows or does not show up. Clubs do have a winning edge when it comes to the WYSIWYG instant gratification thing. That’s why you stand in line for quite a while in front of some of the better ‘places’on a Friday night…

So, the clubs charge fees. What else is new? If anyone wants to open a decent space for guys to have sex with other guys for free, he may also want to invest in a highway exit to this place, too, and most dudes I know would love to have the address NOW.If you can’t spend the 15 bucks to get your rocks off, focus on making a decent living, and get your priorities right.

SC

And let me just say, I don’t describe bathhouses in any way, with the exception of the one bathhouse I’ve seen in Chicago from the outside, which was a very clean and handsome building in a well populated area of town. There was a line of all types of men outside, waiting to get in, and I had been convinced it was a gym. I can’t describe them as dark and sleazy, for I’ve never been inside one, and what is one man’s “dark and sleazy” is another’s “moody and mysterious.” Isn’t it just subjective?

Thank you, MShane, for your very respectful and generous reply. This is what I most yearn for in my lifetime, a way to dialogue to a better understanding, and I believe in my heart that it can be done through a higher level of respect, which is due you as much as anyone. Again, thank you.

The difference is whether we do things to make them (hets) happy, or ourselves.

Keep in mind this very important thing: when we went to the Supreme Court to decriminalize sodomy, it wasn’t on the basis of “we want the right to fuck as many strangers in one night as we possibly can”.

One of the things that we in the gay community need to understand is that the persistence of our gay rights must be based on morality. Our rights are very moral. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

If we allow the gay sleazemerchants to persist in framing our movement as one based on permissiveness, we risk committing suicide.

I do want more money, but not more money than I have earned. Every man in my own family have died young due to heart disease. After having survived the above, I just wish to leave Steve my half the house, so that he doesn’t have to pay taxes. I wish to leave him all that I leave behind without the penalty of taxes and reassessed property values. I wish him to make decisions about me and my care in the hospital. I don’t want our property’s value to be reassessed after my death, so that his property tax increases. All these things his sister-in-law enjoys in her marriage with her husband. That is all I want for Steve. I won’t live to old age, or at least the odds are considerably against me. That is the God’s honest truth. No man has surved 60 in my entire family history.

I don’t care who you sleep with, how many, or where, I really don’t. I just want my equal rights. I don’t wish to squelch anyone, because I feel you should make life what you wish it to be, but I want the same respect to make of my own what I wish.

Am I an assimilationist? I suppose that is up to who levels the accusation against me. I never thought so, but to some die hard cases, I suppose I would have to be. I never asked to be the Belle at the Bathhouse, I couldn’t dream that far, and if I could, I suppose I would still just dream that maybe one person, one man, would love me.

And that is what I got…I found that one man who loved me, no matter what, and I don’t want much else, except my rights and not to have to do battle against my own who see me as someone only interested in assimilation. I just want to protect my partner from the government exercising penalities against him that they would not levy against a straight couple.

Young to many of you, I am an ancient fruit hanging upon my family tree. These philosophical fights wear me out…I just want my rights, and I don’t want to interfere with the rights of others. Isn’t there a way to get on the same page?

Leave it to me to fall in love. I wanted to advance the gay movement by not falling in love and having sex with everything that I could–and like you, I was just marvelous at it, if I do say so myself–but you know, I just couldn’t help myself. My husband’s name is “Steve.” I know how distasteful that is to you to read such assimilationist language, yet that is who he is to me. He has the most remarkable smile, an enormous heart, and this beautiful shock of pre-mature gray hair.

As a young boy, I remember that after a beating,I’d hold my beloved dog Beau, and fall asleep thinking of having someone just like Steve to simply hold hands with on a sofa. I didn’t think so much of fucking some guy, I just thought of loving someone, who was a guy. My dog, Beau, and I would shiver in a corner of my room, as we heard the shouting outside our room, terrified that someone would come back in and beat us again. The only way I ever fell asleep was to imagine myself as a grown man, on a sofa, holding the hand of the man I loved.

I was told that the kids at school all hated me, and that they thought I was weird, so I would return home after classes were over, do my own homework, help my sister with hers, and then retreat into my bedroom to draw and write, taking needed breaks to hold and love my best friend, my dog Beau.

I never knew what to expect. Would I be beaten, or would I just be called a slew of names, and be told that no one liked me. It was always up in the air, but while waiting for it, Beau and I hung out in my room, sometimes shivering at the screaming outside, waiting for it to move closer, and other times just falling asleep–terrified.

One morning, I got ready for school as my parent’s fought. It was a nasty fight, and I kissed Beau and left quickly without breakfast, frightened by the possible outcome. I got out the door without notice. The day was pretty good. Jackie Hoffman was born with a defect, and the boys at school picked on her, screaming and yelling, until I chased them away. People may have thought me weird, but I was a well respected athlete, who few would mess with.

I returned home later that day, and called for Beau. “Beau, come boy, Beau,” I called. He never came. Instead, around the corner, my mother turned, “I put him to sleep today, I don’t want yhou to take your father’s side…you’re so much like him.”

My only friend, gone, and I had left him behind. You know, MShane and Jeton Ademaj, I never wanted to judge anyone else. I never wanted to have anything to do with the choices of anyone else. You see, it was far too risky. But for me, gentlemen, I just wanted a steady and mutually loving relationship. I never raise my voice in anger, I never would strike a living thing, and I even catch crickets in containers and let them out of our house. I rejected violence and drama and, for me, instability.

My sister carried through with a number of unsuccessful relationships, all marked by the type of volatility that my parents showed. My sister embraced the culture of violence we were raised in, while curled up in a ball, being kicked inn the chest and stomach, I can remember thinking, “My life will never be like this.”

There are other people like me, there just have to be. Some of want to mimic the quiet and loving relationships that their parents had…that their belief system they were brought up with, which feels most comfortable. Others yearned for a sense of tranquility and love, wishing for something else. There are those who want to just have sex. Maybe everything was perfect at home, but they just love the act and feel of sex, and that is all they pursue. Some may have a very similar experience to mine, and all they can handle are crisp, great feeling sexual encounters. There must be a million permutations in between.

What Jeton Ademaj and MShane seem unable to give here, is just a nod to the right of others to choose the type of lives that they wish to lead, without having generalized tags applied to them, such as “assimilationist.” Undoubtedly, I’ll take a hit and a bunch of shit for having been honest, but it isn’t like I haven’t had it thrown at me before. But there must be someone out there who hears my plea: Can’t we just respect one another and defend one another for their own personal choices??????

That sentence was intended as a response to posters who used those words here, but
let me clarify then:
I do not care how consenting adults conduct their sex lives. I consider notions like” sexual morality” to be near-useless in judging a person’s character. Ethics are important to me and traits like courage and honesty.

There is no question you can have safe sex, even with multiple partners at a bathhouse or sex club; on the other hand, the complete abandon, absence of protection, and drug/alcohol use common in the seventies combined to make such places extremely efficient in the spread of HIV.

Gay couples who practice unsafe sex should never view monogamy as more than a goal. It’s safer for your lover to suggest you use protection for the next six months (or whatever the incubation/test window is now) than have him think his straying from the program is a dealbreaker and then lie to you. Everyone is human – no exceptions.

Gay couples who practice unsafe sex should never view monogamy as more than a goal. It’s safer for your lover to suggest you use protection for the next six months (or whatever the incubation/test window is now) than have him think his straying from the program is a dealbreaker and then lie to you. Everyone is human – no exceptions.

How dare you assume the nature/simplemindedness of my actions. As Jeton (above ) explains each time we assert who we are we are making a political statement. As a friend of mine remined me, the greatest act of the Afro-American movement was when a little old lady decided that she was not going to be a good old girl and sit in the back of the bus: she actually sat in the front. No amount of speaches could have been as eloquent.
The more I listen to the dialogue here the more you Assimilationists sound just like your shaming Right Wing Religious opponents . You seem to have mistakenpotential byproducts of love for the real thing. Do your ‘rights’ have anything to do with being gay or are they just a manuever for extra money?

I reiterate Jeton: What is the point to being gay except the expression of your sexuality.

Buttfucking is and always will be a political act…and our enemies will always remind you of that whenever you uselessly presume to shift the debate. If you can’t defend buttfucking and rugmunching, you have no business presuming to define Gay Liberation.

This is hilarious. You say that KyleR seeks to set the gay rights movement BACK because he doesn’t think that we should reverse time by 30 years and go back to a time where the bath houses were more of a necesity because everybody was afraid to come out of the closet? Look, I get it, I really do, you are nostolgic for that time….but that doesn’t mean you have to pretend you were involved in some kind of freedom march every time you went into the Bath House. You were there to get your rocks off, and the LAST thing you were thinking about was furthering gay rights.

@rudy: Rudy, you’re right that evolution never stops..you just cant presume what direction it will go in. Many broken records here, but a critical one is that shame breeds shame…between condoms, ARV treatments and personal discretion, the tools already exist to halt the spread of HIV. The most infectious people (*by far*) are those who are newly infected, followed by those infected who are not on treatment. For those who have access to testing and treatment, the biggest obstacles to using either have proven to be SHAME and DENIAL.

You last paragraph in post#121 is an illustration of both…”i’m not going to [blank], buuuut….”

that’s more than a bit shallow of you, especially after you’d only just illustrated your ability to tell a personal history with some nuance.

I’m so glad to hear that.

I will simply take it as you projecting your own shallowness onto me.

Can we just allow one another to navigate their most intimate lives without critiquing it?!

Why don’t sleazy people like being called sleazy? It doesn’t make you a bad person, just a skank.

This is something that has something to do with something, in some manner or another, that affects something to one degree or another?

You are pushing an agenda.

And you’re not?

You have no choice of your own; rather, you have but two choices: that of the social conservatives who would rather you be promiscuous than to engage in monogomy, and that of people like MShane, who claims he does not judge your choices, but then repeatedly states that to “mainstream” is to deny your full scope of the homosexual experience…because, after all, there is only one way to have the homosexual experience, and that will be defined for you by MShane.

Both MGallagher and MShane wish to shame you into accepting their notions of what and who you should be, both are fundamentalists, and both assert messages that (though they deny it)wish to place limits on free association.

Here is the thing you will never hear from MShane: “I don’t get monogomy, it certainly was never for me, was never interested in it, but you know, if that is your thing, then good on you. That’s your choice, and I suppose there ae all sorts sexual choices and turn ons that vary across the vast continuuim of sexuality. It’s just a choice, and I will fight for the rights of every GLBT to make their own choices and enjoy equal rights to heterosexuals.” Instead, you just hear the same language of shame coming from him that you hear from the otherside that wishes to oppress you.

Fundamentalism in all its ilks is so dangerous,so evil, so antithetical to the freedom that MShane wishes to enjoy; yet, he speaks the oppresive language of Fundamentalism when he speaks.

Jeton Ademaj seems to be able to communicate in a way that avoids this, for the most part, if not entirely.

I for one have said throughout that I’m all for those going to bathhouses if that is there thing. Have 100 partners, have 1000, I’ll cheer you on and give you an ovation–fantastic. I don’t find bathhouse fans to be trashy or harmful to our community. However, I find the entire term “assimilationist” to be oppressive in its language, and well overused. Simply enjoying on partner is not necessarily a wish to assimilate, and it may threaten other’s push for greater sexual liberation, I suppose, but it isn’t setting the gay movement (whatever that may mean, I suppose it means different things to different people) back. Frankly, I reject that we have a gay movement, for we are far to disorganized and fractionalized to maintain one.

Thanks for the kudos. I should mention that I’m both supportive of and eager for Federally sanctioned same-gender marriage, and wish someone would at last test Justice Scalia’s LAWRENCE V TEXAS dissent. Among his most intense disappointments there-in was the assertion that the Majority had essentially made gay marriage inevitable, as the reasoning they used would not countenance a firewall between gay and straight marriages…or almost any other institutional discrimination for that matter. The majority at the time disavowed that claim, but I think he was right.

Now, if someone in a good position to do so would just test that!

Thank you for sharing your experience(s) with me.

It sounds like they pretty closely paralleled mine, except you were more fortunate than I with respect to your partner surviving the epidemic and for which I am very happy for the both of you.

My partner of some seven years was not so fortunate. A tad younger than myself, he died of AIDS at the tender age of only 27. To this day, I wonder why it was that he was taken and I am still here to tell the story.

Life can certainly be a giant crap-shoot at times I guess.

Bathhouses and sex parties are indeed a permanent fixture of Gay Culture…they’ve never been for everybody, they’re not uniquely homosexual institutions, but they have always found unique vitality in the male homosexual arena. You can tell the right-wing “that’s not what gayness is about” all you like, I or someone like me will always be there to tell them “he’s just kissing your ass!”…who ya think they’re gonna believe?

As for HIV, it’s amazing how some queers contort their view of Gayness around the specifics of the virus. the fact is that gay men in general are going to be more promiscuous than heterosexual men, for the very cliche that gay men have no women to put the brakes on…prudes like Jason et al demonstrably fail as a substitution. Homophobia has always had sex-phobia as a core-element, so any self-professed gay right’s advocate who claims that “being gay is not about sex” is INEVITABLY fighting with at least one hand tied.

It’s certainly possible to say “to each his own”, but I think some of you aren’t very good at hiding behind that platitude, your *hang-ups* and judgements quickly re-reveal themselves.

Almost incidentally, let me mention that i attended a conference on MRSA in the Gay Community held at the NYC LGBT center in early 2008. Several health experts held a panel/audience discussion on MRSA, HIV and the risks for it. The NYC Health Department’s epidemiology expert was explicit and repetitive in asserting that sex clubs and bath houses in particular proved very clean environments at very low risk for disease transmission as long as safe-sex guidelines were followed.

A consensus emerged that both MRSA and HIV were predominately spreading in private settings where people assumed a false sense of security…not washing as carefully, presuming the hiv-status of their partners n engaging in the riskiest activities. The conference was shown on NY1, was filmed by several sources and is in their archive and the Center’s as well, so put that in your anti-bathhouse pipes n smoke it.

Someday HIV will be cured and/or controlled as a public health risk…at that point people like Jim (#77) will be historical anachronisms at least as accursed as the spineless Hollywood employees who “named names” during the McCarthy-era witch-hunts, and gay sexuality will enjoy less guilt and shame. It’s gonna be a rough ride in the Community until then.

@Rudy: Assimilationism has little familiarity with your situation. “Mainstreamingi”s explicitly a social movement attempt to hide out in heterosexual society as an attemp to deny the fulllscope of your homosexuality; it’s a form of denial; a closet . While Aids is on the rampage people will haveto be carefull. I might suggest that some of your additude comes from havng had the blessing of having made love to a number of men and having success, but , like Michael Signorile being to old to get everything you would like. That’s not an insult , but just a fact about growing older in the ciulture. Assimilationism is a form of Group think pushed by some hypocritical(as it turns out) popular wrters like Anderw Sullivan (too much Catholic guilt.)

I had my first real sex during senior year in high school at the seedy St. Mark’s Baths, which was BEFORE the renovation. I remember being terrified of the 300 pound manager everybody called “Big Red” who threatened he was going to “have me” as he handed me my towel and key in the lobby. The regulars warned me not to enter the locker room when he was in it as you really couldn’t get past him if he decided to block the aisle.

I didn’t discover the Continental until I moved to the city in 1970. Entertainment aside, I had more and better sex at other places. I think this became the general opinion and is why I think it died. One of my fondest memories of that period was when I would pack up my things and step out from the Club Baths at dawn. Still slightly stoned, there was not a part of my body that didn’t ache and tingle from the all night workout. And while there was still time on my clock, I knew there wouldn’t be a drop of cum coming out of me for at least a day. So I’d walk up to the Union Square subway station stopping at Veneiro’s Bakery on the way for a cannoli and espresso.

No argument, it would be absurdly hypocritical for me to judge anybody enjoying that kind of “hypersexual” experience (which you can only do for so long anyway). My life slowly settled down, just in time I guess, as the wrong retrovirus landed in that giant petri dish we gay men had created, and everyone I knew was sucked into an almost ten year nightmare of waiting for test results, wondering who would be next, taking friends to doctors, hospitals, and finally bringing them home to feed them, bathe them, comfort them, and help them to die.

Now that was almost thirty years ago, and while it turned out my partner and I were never infected ourselves, it was as if some giant teacher went up to a chalkboard and erased our lives and most of the people who knew anything about it. What started out as a fairly open relationship complete with occasional threesomes morphed into monogamy and what M SHANE would probably disparage as “assimilationist.”

So while I’m not going to call anybody sluts or other names, epidemiologists will tell you evolution never stops. If the next generation of gay men don’t take any lessons from the generation that went missing, it will happen again.