Bathhouse Daze

Shilts settled early on the idea that ground zero for the emerging AIDS battle in the United States was to be found inside gay bathhouses, once a symbol and artifact of an achieved level of independence and freedom (particularly for gay men) but now a dark corner of an increasingly troubling saga. Author Ira Tattelman noted the role bathhouses played in the “emergence of the gay male community in the latter half of the twentieth century,” explaining that they “provide[d] a public place where a wide mix of strangers [could] come together.… Tolerant of difference, open to a diversity of