Bathhouses in 2026: Dead or Back?

Ask a gay man over sixty about bathhouses and he might mention a specific one, gone now, with the fondness people usually reserve for a first apartment. Ask a gay man under thirty and there’s a decent chance he’s never set foot in one. Both reactions are correct. The bathhouse did not die, exactly, but it did not survive either — not in the form that built it. What exists in 2026 is a smaller, harder, more scattered thing: a few dozen venues worldwide, some of them decades old, a handful of them brand new, all of them operating in the long shadow of a business that used to number in the hundreds.

Steam rooms before Stonewall

Public bathing has been a venue for sex between men for about as long as public bathing has existed. Homosexual activity at bathhouses in Florence got several men prosecuted in 1492, and French authorities were closing down suspect Paris bathhouses by the late 1800s. But the gay bathhouse — a business built around that use rather than merely tolerating it — is a product of early twentieth-century urbanization. As cities filled up and cruising grounds like parks and train stations grew riskier, Turkish- and Russian-style baths in New York, Chicago, and a handful of European capitals developed reputations as relatively safe places to meet other men.

That safety was always conditional. New York police raided the Ariston Hotel Baths in February 1903, arresting 34 men and sending twelve to trial on sodomy charges; some received sentences of up to twenty years. The Everard Baths, a former church on West 28th Street converted into a bathhouse in 1888, would go on to survive fires, raids, and eight more decades of business regardless. Munich’s Maximilians-Hofbad became the center of a 1909 scandal involving officers and minor royals on its off-limits third floor. Discretion, not legality, kept these places running.

Everything changed after Stonewall. Gay liberation gave bathhouse owners room to stop pretending, and through the 1970s the bathhouse became something closer to a civic institution — part sex club, part community center, part unofficial dating market for a generation of men who’d grown up believing none of that was allowed to exist openly. New York’s Continental Baths, operating out of the basement of the Ansonia Hotel from 1968 to 1976, put in a swimming pool, a cabaret stage, and classical statuary, and booked lounge acts including a young Bette Midler backed by an even younger Barry Manilow. The Club Baths chain, founded by activist Jack Campbell in 1965, grew to 42 locations across the US and Canada with roughly 500,000 members at its peak — a number that says something about how central these spaces had become. By the late 1970s, something like 200 gay bathhouses were operating in American cities alone.

Bathhouses were largely dark, steamy and obviously sex-inducing types of places, but some tried to branch into real saunas, bars. nightclubs and entertainment venues, launching the careers of people like Bette Midler.

Then came AIDS, and with it, some of the ugliest and most consequential public health arguments in modern LGBTQ+ history. San Francisco’s public health director, Mervyn Silverman, had told activists in 1983 that closing bathhouses would be inappropriate and probably illegal. A year later he changed his mind, ordering fourteen bathhouses shut on October 9, 1984, in a move he framed starkly: these businesses, he said, were fostering disease and death, not gay liberation. The response split the community roughly down the middle. Some saw a necessary, if belated, public-health intervention; others saw scapegoating dressed up as science, noting that bathhouse operators had been running condom and safer-sex education programs on their own initiative before the city ever got involved. A judge eventually refused to close the baths outright, instead ordering the doors removed from private cubicles and staff installed to monitor patrons for unsafe sex. Faced with those terms, every one of the fourteen closed anyway. Similar closures, court fights, and voluntary shutdowns played out in Los Angeles, New York, and beyond over the following decade. By 1990 the American bathhouse count had fallen from roughly 200 to about 90.

The industry that survived the 1990s never fully recovered its footing before the next blow landed. Grindr launched in 2009 and, within a few years, had quietly done to bathhouses what home video did to porn theaters: made the destination unnecessary. Why drive across town, pay a cover charge, and wrap yourself in a towel when a phone in your pocket could arrange the same encounter down the street in twenty minutes? Owners interviewed in the 2010s described the shift in almost identical terms, wherever they were based — foot traffic in decline, average patron age climbing, rent increases doing the rest. Hollywood Spa in Los Angeles, one of the city’s largest, closed in 2013 citing exactly that combination.

The giants that are gone

Some names are worth remembering precisely because so few people under forty ever walked through their doors.

Continental Baths (New York, 1968–1976) turned bathhouse-going into a genuine cultural event, complete with a cabaret stage and a clientele that included plenty of curious straight New Yorkers there for the entertainment. It closed less because of scandal than because disco and the sexual revolution it helped popularize eventually moved elsewhere.

Club Baths (national chain, 1965–1990s) was, at its height, arguably the largest gay-owned business network in North America — 42 locations and half a million members, according to the chain’s own Wikipedia-documented history. Its East Village flagship at 24 First Avenue, opened in 1971 as the first openly gay-owned bathhouse in New York, is now remembered as one of the earliest recorded epicenters of the city’s HIV cluster.

Everard Baths (New York, 1888–1980s) survived a devastating 1977 fire that killed nine patrons and kept limping along afterward — proof of how much demand still existed even in decline.

Flex Cleveland grew, under owner Charles Fleck, into what its own marketing called the world’s largest bathhouse — more than 55,000 square feet with hotel rooms, indoor and outdoor pools, and a nightclub. Fleck’s sister locations in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Phoenix have all since closed; only Cleveland remains.

Chariots Shoreditch (London, 1997–2020) was, at 20,000 square feet across three floors, the largest gay sauna in the UK, and its Vauxhall, Waterloo, Farringdon, and Streatham sister branches once made Chariots an actual chain rather than a single venue. The pandemic finished what property development pressure had already started; the company went into liquidation in January 2021.

Babylon Bangkok, arguably Southeast Asia’s most famous gay sauna and hotel complex, closed permanently in the past few years; the building has since been demolished.

Midtowne Spa Los Angeles, the last of what had been a multi-city Midtowne chain, closed in December 2022 after fifty years at the same Kohler Street address, its sister Melrose Avenue location having shut five years earlier.

What’s still standing

The venues that remain fall into two rough camps: aging institutions that never stopped operating, and a smaller number of newer builds designed for a market that assumes hookup apps as the default and treats the bathhouse itself as a specialty experience rather than a necessity. Below is a working list of currently operating venues across a spread of major cities, current as of 2026. Hours, pricing, and even survival can change quickly in this industry, so it’s worth checking a venue’s own channels before a visit.

City	Venue	Address / Area	Website	Typical cost	House rules worth knowing
New York	East Side Club	227 E 56th St, Midtown Manhattan	No official website; operates via social channels	Membership required for full rate; non-members pay a premium	21+, ID required, open 24/7, cash preferred in parts of the venue
Los Angeles	North Hollywood Spa	Vineland Ave, North Hollywood	Listed via aggregator profiles; no dedicated site found	Standard locker/room tiers, open 24 hours	18+, ID required
Toronto	Spa Excess	105 Carlton St, Church-Wellesley Village	spaexcess.com	~CAD 20 weekdays, ~CAD 25 weekends for an 8-hour entry	18+, ID checked, entry sold in 8-hour blocks, licensed bar on site
Toronto	Steamworks Toronto	Church St, Church-Wellesley Village	Part of the Steamworks chain	Entry covers 8 hours, discounted weekday midday	18+, ID required, open 24/7
London	Pleasuredrome	Arch 124, Cornwall Rd, Waterloo	pleasuredrome.co.uk	£25 standard, £20 under 30	18+, ID required, open 24/7/365
London	Sweatbox Soho	1-2 Ramillies St, Soho	sweatboxsoho.com	£20 for a 24-hour pass, £12 for under-25s	18+, ID required, open 24/7
Paris	IDM Sauna	4 Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, 9th arr.	Listed via aggregator	Roughly €20-25 standard entry; half price Tuesdays with an LGBT association card	Naked nights on Fridays and Sundays; regular STI screening pop-ups
Paris	Sun City	62 Boulevard de Sébastopol, 3rd arr.	suncity-paris.com	Discount rate around €18 Mondays, standard entry higher	Themed nights vary nightly, discounted entry under 26 on Tuesdays
Berlin	Der Boiler	Mehringdamm 34, Kreuzberg	Listed via Siegessäule	Standard entry with student/early-bird discounts	Berlin’s only dedicated gay sauna as of 2026; mixed weekday/weekend hours
Amsterdam	Thermos Sauna	Raamstraat 33, near Leidseplein	Listed via In Your Pocket	Roughly €19 for 26+, discounts for under-26s	Open 24 hours year-round; monthly free hepatitis B vaccination day
Amsterdam	Sauna Nieuwezijds	City centre, near Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal	saunanieuwezijds.nl	Standard entry, see site for current rates	Men only
Vienna	Kaiserbründl	Weihburggasse 18, 1st district	Listed via wien.info	Around €16-20	Men only; built 1889 in Moorish style inside the former Central Bath; prostitution strictly barred
Bangkok	Chakran Sauna	Soi Ari 4, Phahonyothin, Bangkok	Listed via Travel Gay Asia	Around 450 THB, includes one drink	Rooftop onsen is men-only; peak hours evenings and weekends
Bangkok	R3 Ratchada Sauna	Ratchada Soi 3, Bangkok	Listed via aggregator	380 THB standard, 500 THB weekends/events	18+, themed nights through the week
Tokyo	24 Kaikan Shinjuku	2-13-1 Shinjuku Ni-chome	Listed via Travel Gay	Roughly ¥2,500-3,900 depending on time of entry	ID/passport required, shoes off at entry, overnight rooms available, 8-story venue
Sydney	Sydney City Steam (357)	357 Sussex St, Sydney CBD	Listed via Time Out Sydney	Standard entry, lunchtime and gym-member discounts	Open 24 hours weekends; no alcohol served, as with all Australian sex-on-premises venues
Sydney	Sydney Sauna	Level 1, 38-42 Oxford St, Darlinghurst	Listed via Time Out Sydney	Standard entry	Open 24 hours, private rooms available, no alcohol on site
Mexico City	Sodome Bath House	Zona Rosa	Listed via aggregator profiles	Standard entry, hours limited relative to US/European peers	Men only, staff primarily Spanish-speaking

A pattern is visible in that list even before any commentary gets added: Berlin has exactly one gay sauna left for a city its size; New York has effectively one as well. Paris and London, by contrast, still support half a dozen or more apiece, and Toronto — helped by a comparatively welcoming regulatory climate and an active local advocacy history — punches well above its population weight. Vienna’s Kaiserbründl deserves a special note as the closest thing this list has to a living monument: the building started life as the city’s Central Bath in 1887, reportedly drew Emperor Franz Joseph’s brother Archduke Ludwig Viktor as a regular before a scandal got him banished from court, and has operated as a men’s sauna continuously since 1990.

What actually happens inside one

Rules vary by venue and by country, but a few conventions hold almost everywhere:

Age and ID. Every venue on this list requires proof of age (usually 18, sometimes 21) and a government-issued ID, checked at the door.
Towel or robe only. Street clothes stay in a locker; a towel is standard, with robes offered at some higher-end European venues.
Entry buys time, not a day pass in the hotel sense. North American venues especially tend to sell admission in blocks — commonly eight hours — after which re-entry costs extra.
No means no, and staff generally enforce it. Most well-run venues post consent expectations clearly and will eject patrons who don’t respect a “no.”
Condoms and lube are usually free and visible. This became close to universal industry practice after the 1980s, regardless of a venue’s location or politics.
Alcohol rules vary sharply by jurisdiction. Australian sex-on-premises venues are legally barred from serving alcohol on site; several European and North American venues run full licensed bars.
Photography is essentially always banned, for reasons that should be self-evident.

Dead or back?

Neither answer is quite honest. The mass-market bathhouse — the kind that could support 200 locations across a single country, that booked entertainers, that functioned as a default Friday night rather than a niche destination — is not coming back, and nostalgia for it tends to understate how much of its business model depended on a level of institutional discrimination nobody should want restored. Gay men in most large Western cities in 2026 have far more options for meeting each other than a phone-book listing under “Baths,” and that is a real improvement, whatever it cost the bathhouse industry’s bottom line.

But “dead” overstates the case just as much. San Francisco’s 2020 decision to strip away its Reagan-era bathhouse regulations — the ones requiring monitors and banning locking doors — was a direct, explicit acknowledgment that the public-health logic behind them had expired decades earlier, thanks largely to PrEP and modern HIV treatment. Toronto’s Spa Excess reported its best month on record in the mid-2010s, at a time when American commentators had already written the format’s obituary more than once. Vienna’s Kaiserbründl, New York’s East Side Club, and Toronto’s own venues have simply kept running, generation after generation of regulars aging out and being replaced by new ones, largely undisturbed by the argument about whether they should still exist.

What’s actually died is the assumption of centrality — the idea that a bathhouse was the place, rather than a place. What persists is something more honest about what these venues have always offered underneath the steam and the towels: a room where being gay isn’t a topic of conversation, just the unremarked-upon condition of everyone present. Apps solved the logistics of finding someone. They never quite replicated that.

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