The steamy history of cruising

Leaving aside the occasional foot fungus, there is a relatively safe quality to the kind of fun we have in short bursts in the steam room, however. Very rarely do you see actual intercourse occur; such activity is greeted with shock generally. In a room that often seems frightened of its own shadows, a strange form of puritanical eroticism evolves. The mere sight of exposed flesh takes on a heightened sense of illicit thrill. There may be subtle dangers lurking in the fog of post-gym relaxation. Gym dalliances can be "very male in as much as we, like little doggies on a walk, are spraying our scent to denote ownership and dominance," Murray notes. "All this is to say that it’s a potent activity for us because it allows us to express, at one go, both our identities as powerful men and as rejectable sissies and weaklings."Isn’t this just a more public version of our private sex lives? A classic male combo of strength and vulnerability, writ large on a steamy window? After all, bathhouse encounters have been an integral part of the gay experience in America for over a hundred years. The infamous hospitality of the local YMCA is the stuff of legend of course, but there were also the seaside nooks of Coney Island and the Russian baths of Manhattan, which evolved into the overtly sexual scenes of the Wall Street Sauna and Man’s Country in New York. The Slot in San Francisco catered to the emerging bondage scene, while the Club Bath chain created the first franchise system for baths, adding amenities such as televisions and vending machines, and boasting 500,000 members by the early seventies. As gay sex gradually decriminalized itself, these surreptitious venues became less of a necessity and more of a naughty luxury for the urban party elite. The gym steam room, with its workaday necessity in many of our lives, remains one of the few daily reminders of this furtive history. Perhaps it represents a banal lifeline to a past that many of us either remember fondly or have only heard about in excited whispers.This trip down memory lane is most likely a pale parallel, both in pleasures found and risks taken. But risks do remain, for both gym buffs and management alike. In 2005, a man sued Manhattan’s David Barton gym for $25,000, claiming that the management did little to nothing to curb sexual activity in the locker rooms. The gym had been the subject of rumors before. The New York Blade ran a story a few years earlier about reports of cruising in the gym, when a gay patron complained.Later that year, a Gold’s Gym in the Castro district closed its doors indefinitely after receiving numerous complaints and a health department warning. They re-opened, only to be shut down again in 2007, the same year the Equinox chain got slammed with complaints from their cleaning staff about lewd and embarrassing (not to mention messy) behavior at their locations. The cleaning staff, all Hispanic men, complained about having to clean male splooge. The negative publicity associated with these incidents caused a backlash within the gay community itself against this type of behavior.Now policed from within as well as from outside authorities, those of us who choose to let it all hang out while we sweat at the gym face an odd sort of dilemma. How do you balance complex primal needs with those of the community? Has the door to the steam room finally swung open permanently, letting in the cold air of reality once and for all? Or can those of us who still choose to let the rush of blissful ignorance wash over us after a strenuous workout still enjoy a little down time with the boys without making a federal case out of it? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain: Steam isn’t the only pressure felt in these dens of complexity.