make of it what you will.... :
"NEW YORK - Wearing just a small white towel and a
smile, Bob prowls the dark halls of the East Side Club, looking into dozens of its closet-sized rooms and hoping eye
contact with another man will lead to sex.
“It’s better than going to a bar and taking your chances,” said
Bob, a 46-year-old garden supplies salesman from New Jersey who declined to give his last name. “You always know
something is going to happen here.”
For some gay men, the city’s two 24-hour bathhouses — the East Side Club
in midtown and the West Side Club in Chelsea — live on as a spot for sex without strings despite a recent trend
toward more men hooking up online.
They rent small rooms to have sex in at a cost of $21 for four hours,
after paying a nominal annual membership fee.
Bathhouses, pushed to the fringes of the gay scene in the
mid-1980s when the city shuttered most of them to stem the spread of AIDS, still offer patrons something a bar or
the Internet cannot — near-guaranteed sex in a safe environment.
“In a bathhouse you meet a person in the
flesh in a relatively safe and clean environment where everyone has the same agenda,” said Bill Stackhouse, director
of the Institute for Gay Men’s Health at the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a group that fights AIDS in New York
City.
“It’s safer than the Internet, where all you have is a photo and maybe some video footage before you go
to someone’s home,” he said.
Operating a business for the purpose of sex violates state law. City officials
say they do inspect the bathhouses, but they are not legally allowed to look inside the rented rooms.
“We do
not access private areas within establishments, ‘private’ meaning closed-door, to make observation,” said Isaac
Weisfuse, deputy commissioner for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Several
officials, asked why the city effectively turns a blind eye to the bathhouses, declined comment. The office of Mayor
Michael Bloomberg also declined comment.
An itch to scratch
The two clubs are owned by businessman Ancil
Brown, who declined an interview request, but managers at the clubs allowed a reporter to tour the facilities and
interview patrons.
Nearing midnight on a Saturday at the East Side Club, dozens of middle-aged men roamed
the labyrinthine hallways, hoping to have anonymous sex. Downstairs, five men waited to get in from the lobby,
looking as ordinary as any group of suburban fathers waiting at a dental office.
Peter, 57, a construction
manager with silver hair, goes to the East Side Club once every two weeks and has for years.
“You have that
itch, and it feels good to scratch it,” said Peter, who also did not want to give his last name. “There is still a
place to go for it. You should see this place at 6 (p.m.) before all of the guys go home to their wives.”
Both clubs smell of chlorine and loud techno music bounces off the ceiling and walls of the thin, dark
hallways, which are lined with about 100 rooms and separate steam rooms and showers. They are both housed
anonymously in Manhattan office blocks, identified only by discreet entries on the tenant directory inside the lobby
of each building.
Customers can rent lockers or rooms, which are about 6 by 8 feet, of which a bed with a
2-inch-thick mattress takes up more than half. A small lamp dimly lights the
rooms."
....................................
and so on.... how many of these guys practice safe
sex ? before "going home to their wives" ? Whoa, man... and, like, where does the wife's right to know fit
into this picture ?
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