The order to close is posted on the front door. The institution was one of many gay bathhouses that the city closed in the 1980s as a response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. 6, 1986, New Yorkers pass by the shuttered St. What did the bathhouses mean to New York’s gay community in the mid-1980s? If many baths weren’t created “for the purpose of men to seek out sexual encounters with each other,” Engel explained, “by the turn of the 20th century, some became known as ‘favorite spots’ where same-sexual relations were not discouraged. political and legal development and social movements, particularly involving LGBTQ issues. In June, the Chicago-Kent Law Review will publish the research by Lyle, a former visiting professor at Bates who is now an assistant professor of English at Iona, and Engel, a professor of politics who studies U.S. The lunchtime session in a Commons meeting room drew an enthusiastic capacity crowd, perhaps drawn in part by the talk’s title, which for the first time in this context at Bates dropped an F-bomb: “F***ing with Dignity: Public Sex, Queer Intimate Kinship, and How the AIDS Epidemic Bathhouse Closures Constituted a Dignity Taking.”
NEW YORK GAY SEX CLUB SERIES
(It’s a concept originated by Bernadette Atuahene, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.)Įngel and Lyle presented their recent research as part of an interpretive series accompanying the college production of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. In short, as professors Stephen Engel of Bates and Timothy Lyle of Iona College argued during a March 2 talk at the college, the bathhouse shutdowns constituted a “dignity taking”: a confiscation of property, made without just compensation or legitimate public purpose, whose goal is to infantilize or dehumanize the affected group.
Timothy Lyle, assistant professor of English at Iona College (at left), and Stephen Engel, associate professor of politics at Bates, present research arguing that the 1980s closure of New York City’s gay bathhouses was an act of “dignity taking” from the gay community.