Gay bathhouse in detroit

A place to get sex 24/7, like a 24-hour convenience store.”

The analogy is apt.

Still another will say the dangers are being overstated.If people talk about gay bathhouses it is almost always an issue of black or white.

The debate even extends to the respective owners of Detroit’s two bathhouses, who have an enormous sense of propriety about their establishments. From beyond the tall wooden fence that surrounds the deck, music from an ice cream truck fades in and out of earshot as it circles the block.

As AIDS decimated her city’s gay population in 1982, San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein started the charge to close the baths, even though most men at the time were too scared to go. He’s routinely able to counter opinions about baths with his research data, but conclusions about straight-identifying men elude him.

There are posted signs stating that the club prohibits sexual activities, and according to TNT owner Daniels, the staff is told to expel anyone they see having sex.

There are also major differences in the clientele. In the following years, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago came up with variations on San Francisco’s enforcement policy.

No such legislation was ever enacted in Detroit, and there are no regulations today, even while the city contends with a soaring syphilis rate.

“There are no laws or proposed laws that deal with these places,” explains Sean Kosofsky, policy director of the Detroit chapter of Triangle Foundation, a national gay rights organization.

As one paramour wraps himself in a towel, light from outside catches a gold wedding band. Above a string of plastic American flags, the afternoon is clear and breezy. I don’t let someone fuck me without a condom, but if I’m going to fuck someone I don’t use a condom. “But we do deal with other organizations and that’s none of his business.

At 50 years old, Daniels is extremely animated. It's like Disney world to me lol. Other patrons mumble rumors about Body Zone’s “wild parties.”

“What happens at the BZ, it’s their business, not ours,” Daniels states diplomatically.

“You walk in and it’s like ‘Cheers,’” Joshua jokes about TNT. “Everyone knows your name.” Of Body Zone he adds, “This place is not just a bathhouse in Detroit.

One person testifies that they kill gay men; another claims that they are safe space for sexual rebirth. It was an incident serious enough to require spinal surgery, and the scar remains as physical reminder of Daniels’ struggle for the privacy and the safety of his patrons.

Anthony Harris, a Detroit Health Department worker who has been stationed on-site at the baths, says, “The places themselves are very receptive to us.

Bathhouses exist in every major city in the country, and while few of them are well-known to the straight community, surveys in major cities suggest that at least 30 percent and as many as 60 percent of gay men have visited them.

Detroit public health officials say Body Zone, the area’s most popular sexual convenience store among younger men, gets as many as 1,000 patrons on any given weekend.

When I went there on my few times, I would stay for hours and hours lol. I find a place on the bottom row of tiered seating and take long conscious breaths, drawing in dense, humid air that smells sweet from cologne and cedar, and salty from sweat and sex. In New York and California, dramatic STD outbreaks have caused public officials to close baths or restrict the activities of patrons.

Detroit’s chart-topping syphilis stats beg a difficult question: Are bathhouses a health threat to the community?

We will not deal with Covey.”

Covey declined to comment, other than to say that he stood by his comments to Between the Lines.

When I first contact Daniels over the phone to ask some questions about the TNT, I am met with threats of a lawsuit. “They’re a part of our communities, and each special interest group in our community has a different sense of ownership of them.

This is the important part: Men who want high-risk sex can find places to have it, and closing bathhouses doesn’t deter them.

“What I think Dan Savage is saying is that if you really care about gay men you will close them down, but there are a lot of guys who go there for whatever their reasons are and it is not to have UAI — they are very careful to not get HIV when they’re there,” Woods asserts.