In his memoir City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s, Edmund White remembers the Everard as "filthy. Author Gore Vidal met his longtime partner, Howard Austen, at Everard in 1950 over the years Everard was reportedly visited by the writer Truman Capote, theater director Alfred Lunt, the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, and gay rights activist and writer Larry Kramer. Today, even as so much has changed for the better for the LGBT community - marriage legal, queerness visible like never before - the tragedy in Orlando reminds us that safe spaces for queer people, and particularly queer people of color, have never been safe, and have never been protected in the way that they should be.Įverard Baths was not just any gay bathhouse the writer Michael Rumaker, in his account of going to the baths ( A Day and a Night at the Baths) for the first time in the winter of 1977, called Everard "the most venerable, loathed, and affectionately esteemed baths in all of New York City." Everard (or "Ever-hard," as it was nicknamed) had opened as a Turkish bath in 1888, but by the 1920s it had become a known, and culturally significant, gathering place for gay men. The bathhouse had long been an anonymous space where gay men could be themselves without shame - but the fire at the Everard reinforced the idea for many queer men that the few spaces they thought were truly their own weren't always safe. But even as the '70s in New York were a relatively open, exciting time to be a gay man in New York - pride parades, gay bars and clubs proliferating, a mainstream weekly gay newspaper, a gay rights protest at the 1976 Democratic National Convention in New York - being openly gay, whether on the street or in the workplace, still came with dangers.
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But by the time the fire engines came wailing down 28th Street around 7 a.m., nine men - trapped inside a building with blocked-up windows and no fire escapes - would not make it out alive.Įight years after Stonewall, the tragedy at the Everard Baths - never investigated as anything but an accidental mattress fire - marked the beginning of the end of a brief, exuberant heyday of New York City gay life that was able to thrive in part because of cheap real estate and a city government that was willing to look the other way when it came to, say, S&M clubs like the Mineshaft in the Meatpacking District (dress code included no cologne). They would have been hanging out in the steam room or the sauna, grabbing something to eat from the snack shop in the lobby, swimming laps in the heavily chlorinated pool in the basement, getting a massage, smoking a joint, buying drugs from the attendant on the third floor, or having sex on a bed in one of the private cubicles or the big, communal L-shaped dormitory, also known as the orgy room.
Tuesday night was a big night at the baths, and many of the men would have rented one of the 135 tiny cubicles for $7 for 12 hours, or just a locker for $5.
Maybe there were 80 to 100, as the building owner estimated later. No one knows exactly how many men were inside the Everard Baths in the early morning hours of Wednesday, May 25, 1977.