St louis gay sauna

The club is situated in a warehouse district near downtown St. Louis, a low building with turn-of-the-century brickwork that looks like every other low brick building in the city, surrounded by weedy parking lots and rusty chain link fences. When my friend Steven invited me to soak in the hot tub with him there, I had to Google it to make sure it was what I thought it was.

I grew up in the eighties and nineties and knew only the Time After, when the crusades to shut them down in cities like San Francisco and New York underscored the fear of the plague and the drive to exterminate queerness rather than caring for the sick. That fear crept into my Midwestern Southern Baptist existence and made every queer person a gay man, wasting away, an ominous cautionary tale, body poison to everyone around him.

I could only see the view from the TV at the Days Inn, where I cleaned rooms; from there, queer joy was as removed—as irrelevant—as Broadway, Wall Street, and Hollywood. It gay in this forbidden way. Still, I was curious. Bathhouses are a quintessential part of gay culture, specifically cis male gay culture.

In the last century, these places have served as safe ish places for gay men to have intimate time with other men, secluded from the life and career-demolishing eyes of the police. But times had long since changed. Steven is an activist and an irrepressible extrovert who can talk his way into nearly anything; he gay determined to break down the barriers for trans and nonbinary people in all places, even decades-old bathhouses.

He was in the process of convincing the owners and management of The Club that all people who identify as male should be allowed equal access to the sauna, workout room, lounge and entertainment area, swimming pool, hot tub, and, you know, everything else. While this may not be revolutionary on the coasts, Missouri is different.

His success led to an offer of a test mission, and he needed a wingman, which is how I became the first trans man to get naked in this gay bathhouse. Steven and I were both in our forties, both balding with beards although he had more hairboth having had top surgery. We were different in louis ways. Steven surrounded himself with queerness, and nearly every aspect of his life included people in various versions of gender.

He avoided tricky situations like doctors and locker rooms, whereas I was, and am still, nearly always the only trans person in the room. I had undressed quickly and guardedly in the YMCA for years, and it amazed me that not one guy in the very sauna YMCA locker room had ever looked past my tattoos and bald head to see the incision marks on my chest or the significantly different anatomy between my legs.

I knew when to be uncomfortable. Maintaining the louis that I was just like every other man took up giant swaths of bandwidth in my head. I diverted attention. I had been a very sauna trans man for over a decade.

Gay St Louis

It was about something closer. Something infinitely intimate and unknowable. Sex was complicated. It was all fantasy, like virtual reality where I was all of the avatars—the person touching, the person being touched, the person looking, the person being looked at—while I stayed locked behind the screen. And nowhere was this collection of avatars more present than when I tried strap-ons.