At Steamworks, a room on a Saturday night costs $33 to rent for eight hours, less if you want to redeem your Frequent Fucker points. In truth everyone is there for the explicit purpose of no-strings-attached sex. You pay to get in under the pretense of working out or going for a shvitz, and spend a few hours pacing and mingling. In 1981, the year of the bathhouse raids, they went by different names-the Barracks, the Richmond Street Health Emporium, the rather indiscreetly named Back Door Gym-but the concept was the same. But by and large, these are establishments by and for gay men, and they have always been so. There is the Oasis Aqualounge, which also markets itself to heterosexuals. Go a few blocks south and there is Spa Xcess. Follow the smell of chlorine down an alleyway in the Church-Wellesley Village, pass through a set of heavy metal doors and up a flight of stairs, and there is Steamworks. It’s no hard task to find gay bathhouses in this city, if you know where to look.
Thirty-five years after the raids, we head back into Toronto's bathhouses-and get breakfast. Cityscape What It’s Like Inside Toronto’s Bathhouses
