Gay bath seattle

The area’s LGBTQ+ 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 space for same-sex attracted 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 popular during the Alaska Gold Rush. While the sexuality of the bathers who visited during the early 1900s is unknown, at some show around World War II, customers were almost exclusively gay men.

While a bathhouse is often viewed as a solely sexual vacuum (and indeed, men did have sex there), it was also a social space. As the era of gay civil rights dawned, other bathhouses that served gay men opened in Seattle, though South End, with its longer history, tended to doodle an older clientele. A sense of community flourished in bathhouses, and some went because they were considered less prone to raids than, say, 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 End instituted a women’s night, but by this point, the LGBTQ+ collective was facing a crisi