Georgia Voice on Flex Atlanta

infopop · #1 1st November 2017, 11:52 AM

There's a good article in Georgia Voice specifically about Flex Atlanta that also speaks more generally to the bathhouse experience and its role in gay life over the decades.

Midtown Atlanta bathhouse Flex remains a stronghold of gay liberation 40 years on

Many bathhouses have been closing in recent years, but the author sees signs of life at Flex and thinks it may be time for bathhouses to make a comeback.

Here's an excerpt, starting from the 1970s attitudes:

Quote:

"It was kind of like a speakeasy," recalled longtime Atlanta resident Dave Hayward, who began visiting the bathhouse, then known as Club Atlanta Baths, in the 1970s. "You wouldn't know it was there unless you knew it was there [mdash] it's kind of off the beaten path, at the end of a sort of dead-end street."

Bathhouses have long been an open, dirty little secret for gay men, rarely talked about outside of close circles of friends, and the bane of those who yearn for a more respectable, less promiscuous, public image of homosexuality.

"It was always considered to be something that was on the down low," Hayward says. "You would do it, but you’re not going to say, 'I had a great time at the baths last night,' unless you were talking to close friends."

For today, the article concludes with the suggestion that

Quote:

...Flex and other bathhouses might be on the brink of a renaissance.

"I guess there will always be a place for that, that is, anonymous sex," Robison say[s]. "These days, with PrEP and with treatment leading to undetectable equals untransmittable, I imagine that they will take off again."

Your thoughts?

~ Bob

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