LGBTQ+

In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, Paul M. would often fill himself with liquid courage before he slipped through the doors of Club LaGrange, a gay bathhouse that occupied a worn but majestic brownstone in a gritty slice of downtown Boston.

Up a flight of stairs, he’d approach the counter, supply his name and some cash, before proceeding to a room or locker, where he’d stow his clothes and don a towel. Then, for the night, he was anonymous and free to explore the showers, saunas and private rooms of the club—each space a new opportunity to cruise for sex.

“I was young, horny and in the closet,” says Paul, now 82 years old; the bathhouses—outside the gaze of the more public gay bars—filled a need for him.

Boston never had a legendary gay bathhouse scene like those in New York or San Francisco—partly due to a hangover of “Puritan prudishness” that augured a tamer scene overall, according to historians. Boston’s gay community, some of its own members admit, was not as “wild” or uninhibited as those in other large American cities. But for a period in the 1970s and ’80s, a string of baths in the city gave gay men like Paul crucial community spaces—which were also on the forefront of public health, before and after the AIDS crisis hit.