The intricate politics of steam room culture

There's simply no denying it-something about the combination of hot steam, ill-fitting towels, and the relaxing glow of post-workout exhaustion gets the male juices flowing. Depending on how you view it, steam room sex is either the last hurrah of liberating seventies-era gay culture or a grim reminder of that era's excesses and dangers, both psychological and physical.

Anecdotally of course, it's hard to visit any major gym locker room in one of our urban centers without coming away thinking we favor the former, not the latter view. Steam room dalliances are such an inherent part of the big city gym experience that permanent signage appears next to most sauna and steam room doors warning that any inappropriate activity will result in banishment from the gym and the possibility that the local Department of Health will shut down the locker room amenities altogether.

Much ado about nothing?

Gym culture is now such an ingrained part of the gay world in major cities that it is tempting to see all of this as much ado about nothing. Boys will be boys, and we've all seen enough wedding bands on the hands groping at us to think that even straight men aren't completely immune to the siren song of misty sexual encounters. There is an undeniable and potent veil of anonymity drawn when we enter the small wooden rooms that smell of toasted flesh. Furtive glances size up the room's inhabitants as your hands hover close to the opening in your towel, just waiting for the right signals from the others present to cross the line from socially acceptable to indecent.

When the door opens, of course, hands instinctively fly away from barely exposed areas. The outside world, with all of its conventions and insecurities, rushes in with the clammy air of too many showers. The newcomer is quickly sized up, and once the door seals again order is restored, and the game continues apace.

It is a game with many potential pleasures and few realized ones, which only adds to the frustrating allure of such a dicey public experience. Unlike an actual sex club or backroom, there are many different wild cards that must be watched for in our predominantly gay steam rooms. There are some men who seem to enjoy the experience in a completely non- sexual manner. They are often the ones you see in their flip-flops with several towels carefully tucked to avoid accidental exposure, doing breathing exercises.

Or the absurdly hot but painfully obvious straight men who seem to have no trouble at all opening their towels and doing stretches in front of everyone, driving the room crazy with thwarted lust. Occasionally, a gay man himself will surprise the room by shaming everyone back into concealing themselves again. And it's hard not to notice the undercover gym plants, sent to police the area. These men are usually about as subtle as an undercover cop at a bus station men's room, sometimes even wearing shorts and sandals out of discomfort with their bawdy chore.

But sometimes the stars align and you have one of those experiences that makes you believe in anonymous public sex again. That adorable muscular boy you saw in the free weight area wanders in while you are alone and smiles, opening his towel and inviting you to explore the heady mysteries of instinctual attraction with him. No one bothers you as time and space seem to melt away and afford you the intoxicating luxury of pure sensual pleasure with a beautiful stranger. It happens maybe one out of every fifty trips to the steam room, but it's enough to keep you coming back for more, just in case.

But what drives many of us to these encounters? Are the infrequent successes worth the potentially embarrassing and psychologically damaging side effects? Is this merely harmless fun - what you can't see very well can't hurt you? "There are always two sides of every coin," says Christopher Murray, a Manhattan- based therapist specializing in gay issues. "Just as much as we are aggressively, and perhaps in a subtle way sadistically, showing ourselves to ourselves as dominant, we are also flirting with disaster- by risking exposure, humiliation, rejection, as well as physical and emotional violence."

The steamy history of cruising

Leaving aside the occasional foot fungus, there is a relatively safe quality to the kind of fun we have in short bursts in the steam room, however. Very rarely do you see actual intercourse occur; such activity is greeted with shock generally. In a room that often seems frightened of its own shadows, a strange form of puritanical eroticism evolves. The mere sight of exposed flesh takes on a heightened sense of illicit thrill.No fisting required.

There may be subtle dangers lurking in the fog of post-gym relaxation. Gym dalliances can be "very male in as much as we, like little doggies on a walk, are spraying our scent to denote ownership and dominance," Murray notes. "All this is to say that it's a potent activity for us because it allows us to express, at one go, both our identities as powerful men and as rejectable sissies and weaklings."

Isn't this just a more public version of our private sex lives? A classic male combo of strength and vulnerability, writ large on a steamy window? After all, bathhouse encounters have been an integral part of the gay experience in America for over a hundred years.

The infamous hospitality of the local YMCA is the stuff of legend of course, but there were also the seaside nooks of Coney Island and the Russian baths of Manhattan, which evolved into the overtly sexual scenes of the Wall Street Sauna and Man's Country in New York. The Slot in San Francisco catered to the emerging bondage scene, while the Club Bath chain created the first franchise system for baths, adding amenities such as televisions and vending machines, and boasting 500,000 members by the early seventies.

As gay sex gradually decriminalized itself, these surreptitious venues became less of a necessity and more of a naughty luxury for the urban party elite. The gym steam room, with its workaday necessity in many of our lives, remains one of the few daily reminders of this furtive history. Perhaps it represents a banal lifeline to a past that many of us either remember fondly or have only heard about in excited whispers.

This trip down memory lane is most likely a pale parallel, both in pleasures found and risks taken. But risks do remain, for both gym buffs and management alike. In 2005, a man sued Manhattan's David Barton gym for $25,000, claiming that the management did little to nothing to curb sexual activity in the locker rooms. The gym had been the subject of rumors before. The New York Blade ran a story a few years earlier about reports of cruising in the gym, when a gay patron complained.

Later that year, a Gold's Gym in the Castro district closed its doors indefinitely after receiving numerous complaints and a health department warning. They re-opened, only to be shut down again in 2007, the same year the Equinox chain got slammed with complaints from their cleaning staff about lewd and embarrassing (not to mention messy) behavior at their locations. The cleaning staff, all Hispanic men, complained about having to clean male splooge. The negative publicity associated with these incidents caused a backlash within the gay community itself against this type of behavior.

Now policed from within as well as from outside authorities, those of us who choose to let it all hang out while we sweat at the gym face an odd sort of dilemma. How do you balance complex primal needs with those of the community? Has the door to the steam room finally swung open permanently, letting in the cold air of reality once and for all? Or can those of us who still choose to let the rush of blissful ignorance wash over us after a strenuous workout still enjoy a little down time with the boys without making a federal case out of it? Only time will tell, but one thing is certain: Steam isn't the only pressure felt in these dens of complexity.