He forces you to buy a membership to join. You check-in with a front-desk man behind thick glass. It resembles a spaceship, the walls a gleaming, futuristic-like chrome alloy. It is spotlessly clean top-bottom, pun-intended. Sure enough, I couldn’t unravel the magic trick, so I got wasted and went to the bathhouse. The gambit was if I couldn’t explain how the trick worked, I’d have to go to Steamworks that afternoon. I went to Steamworks first when I was 23 years old after betting a bisexual magician I could figure out his card trick. In Chicago, the legendary gay bathhouse is Steamworks. But this story is about bathhouses set-up strictly for the pleasure and purpose of gay male sex:

Or stop what happens every “Men’s Only” day at the Turkish Bathhouses on 10th street in NYC. Those spas prohibit any sexual interaction, though that didn’t stop the guy giving everyone a blow job in the sauna one Tuesday afternoon at King Spa in Niles, IL. I’ve also gone to regular bathhouses, like Korean and Russian spas, which I find restorative. I’ve visited three gay bathhouses in my life.

THIS STORY IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK OR FOR THOSE TURNED OFF BY DESCRIPTIONS OF HARDCORE GAY SEXUAL SITUATIONS.