It's for research, really!

June 11, 2008 8:30 PM

Scholarly journal article on gay bathhouses - can't find an article I read a few years back.

In a recent conversation with a friend about such matters, I mentioned an article I read a few years ago on gay bathhouses. He was curious (and perhaps even slightly disbelieving that I read this in an actual journal) so I'd love to find at least a link, but full text would be extra, extra good.
Here is what I remember:
- Read it between 2000 and 2002 while working on another project
- Stumbled across it in a sociology or queer studies journal (am pretty sure)
- It was fairly recent at that time
- I think it was written not by a participant (like Tattleman's piece) but by a man who wrote from a detached observer POV
- The wikipedia article on bathouses seems to have a lot of the same information, but none of those cites look right.

Please help me convince my friend I found this in a "real" journal, not a skin mag (not that there is anything wrong with skin mags!)

Anonymous because of coworkers on MeFi but gmail is [e-mail]

posted by anonymous to grab bag (12 comments total)

Perhaps an excerpt from Samuel Delaney's autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water? Or the Joan Scott essay entitled The Evidence of Experience, which discusses Delaney extensively.
posted by Morpeth at 8:36 PM on June 11

I seem to remember an article like this on Fark a couple years ago. Something like "A straight man infiltrates a bathhouse". Maybe try searching there.
posted by Octoparrot at 8:49 PM on June 11

Could it have been:

"Sexual Risk-Taking in Gay Men: The Relevance of Sexual Arousability, Mood, and Sensation Seeking", in the Archives of Sexual Behavior? It was in Volume 32, Number 6 (December, 2003), pages 555-572. The co-authors are John Bancroft, Erick Janssen, David Strong, Lori Carnes, Zoran Vukadinovic and J. Scott Long. I worked with some of them circa 2001 and I believe they were doing research on bathhouses in Indiana even then, so if this article isn't the one, you might want to try searching for other, earlier articles by the same authors.
posted by homelystar at 8:52 PM on June 11

A quick trip through JSTOR turns up a couple of scholarly articles about bathhouses, one in the Journal of Sex Research and another in Culture, Health, and Sexuality, but only the first falls in your time frame.
posted by thomas j wise at 8:55 PM on June 11

Not really answering the question, but what about And the Band Played On?
posted by cklennon at 8:57 PM on June 11

Came in here to second Morpeth's recommendation of The Evidence of Experience.
posted by suedehead at 9:28 PM on June 11

The New Yorker and the New York times both had expose sorts of things on crystal meth usage in bathhouses and the like, in the context of risktaking activities. I was both scared straight and not so much scared straight, with quotes like:

"“I used to have the house and the Mercedes and the big job,” a lawyer named Larry told me at Tina’s Café. “Then I fell into crystal. Oh, my God, it was great. I felt young and powerful and wonderful. And the sex. I was having the type of sex I could have only fantasized about before.” He sat for a moment and sipped from a can of Diet Coke. “Crystal destroyed my life,” he said...Larry has been off methamphetamine for three years, but he says the struggle begins anew every day. “Crystal motivates everything. The sex. The desire. Everything.” He shook his head. “I wish I had never heard of it, but I can’t say it wasn’t great.”
posted by redsparkler at 9:33 PM on June 11

My old advisor did work with HIV transmission in bathhouses with a graduate student here at Georgia Tech. I'm linking a paper below, which isn't it obviously, but you could check its references.

Here's a perma-link which links to the Full Text and PDF Versions.
The Role of Bathhouses and Sex Clubs in HIV Transmission: Findings From a Mathematic Model.
posted by djpyk at 9:49 PM on June 11

Laud Humphreys' 1970 dissertation Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Personal Places could be what you're thinking of.

It was groundbreaking, but horrifyingly unethical - I know about it only because it was introduced as an example of a complete absence of ethics in an ethnographic methods class I took.
posted by bubukaba at 10:21 PM on June 11

(You could also check out the books and articles that reference Humphreys' books at Google Books - since his was one of the first studies of its kind, the article you're thinking of may well cite it.)
posted by bubukaba at 10:23 PM on June 11

I know someone who did his PhD dissertation on gay bathhouses in Berlin. Maybe not Berlin specifically, maybe just Germany. If you MeMail me I can give you some info about him and you can try to track it down if you like.
posted by KAS at 7:07 AM on June 12

There were several bathhouse-specific articles in Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender & Conformity, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. The anthology is a mix of fairly academic articles and personal essay, and I don't remember where some/any/all of the bathhouse articles fell on that spectrum.
posted by soviet sleepover at 12:33 PM on June 12