I’m working with Marshall Watson, Heather Zwicker and Todd James from Exposure: Edmonton’s Queer Arts and Culture Festival on an event that will see Exposure rent out Steamworks Bathhouse for an evening during the festival and populate it with the work of 20 visual and performance artists, transforming the space into a one-night-only art installation. It will give those who have never been before an opportunity to visit a bathhouse, and diversify the experience for those who have. From the fantasy of anonymous casual sex to their gender exclusion, bathhouses loom large in our collective queer experience and psyche.
I first heard about bathhouses as a young man, when the Down Under Bathhouse opened near 124 Street. People in the neighborhood were complaining about it, and I remember feeling that they were not just condemning the bathhouse but also homosexuality. I couldn’t help but feel personally attacked when they threw around words like “moral” and “decency.” For me it all added to the transgressive allure of the bathhouse.
As I learned and thought more about bathhouses I knew that sooner or later I would have to visit one. Like a lot of guys the idea of visiting a bathhouse in my own city was out of the question. The fear of running into someone I knew—naked!—was too much to overcome. I thought to myself if I was ever in another city with a hankering to go to a bathhouse, I would.
Last year on a cold night alone in Calgary I did just that. To be honest, the experience was anticlimactic. For all the build up and curiosity the bathhouse was not the den of sexual utopia or even transgression I wanted it to be. I was hoping that the bathhouses would be a place where the physical and the flesh was seen as a gateway to deeper experience and knowing, where people acted with pride and curiosity, understanding that their body is a tool from which they can understand all there is to know. I wanted naked bodies to be working in abandoned fashion in concert with other bodies. Maybe somewhere this vision is a reality but that night the bathhouse just seemed like a refuge where men who didn’t have anywhere else to go met to have sex. I guess I was hoping that the bathhouse was about exploration, but that night it seemed more about desperation.
While reviewing the submissions for the bathhouse Exposure programming chair Todd Janes said something that in a way explained my experience at the bathhouse. He said, “Because of AIDS Bathhouses have lost two generations.” Later, with Exposure Chair Heather Zwicker’s help, I came to understand that what he meant was the first generation was lost to HIV/AIDS and the following generation was lost to fear.
Janes is right—not just about what has been lost at the bathhouses but what has been lost in gay culture altogether. A few weeks ago Richard Berkowitz was in town for the Edmonton International Film Festival for the screening of Sex Positive, Daryl Wein’s documentary detailing Berkowitz’s role as one of the architects of safer sex in the ‘80s. There is a moment in the film when Berkowitz talks about how the gay sexual psyche has changed in the face of AIDS. Before AIDS gay men came together to have the raunchiest hottest sex imaginable, understanding that they were living out a fantasy. But, from Berkowitz’s perspective, gay men now come together and have the same kind of sex but with no awareness of fantasy or that they are working out the shit that the culture continues to put on them. It is this disconnect and lack of internal engagement that creates the potential for bathhouses to be gathering grounds of the fearful rather than playgrounds for the curious.
At the end of the day, all our political gains and cultural cache are worth nothing if we have forgotten what it is to be gay on our own terms. In a very real way bathhouses are a battleground. We must wrestle them back from the brink of the unspoken and integrate them back into healthy sexual practice. We must not judge them, we must open them up and we must support them in an effort to, as Sarah Race, the photographer of the photo above, suggests with her title: live a bit more.
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