2, 4īecause the association between HIV and baths was identified early in the epidemic, 5 – 11 investigators have given considerable attention to sex venues generally. 3 Generally speaking, gay baths provide relative physical safety for patrons (although police harassment of bathhouse and sex club patrons occurs, it has been relatively rare). These are usually called gay bathhouses (or baths), although they go by other names (e.g., sex clubs, tubs, saunas, and health clubs).
Certain other commercial venues exist primarily to provide an opportunity for MSM to have sex with other MSM. Consequently, MSM who frequent these venues share them with people who are not seeking sexual encounters on the premises, and MSM take certain risks in looking for sexual encounters, including risk of discovery, physical harm, or arrest.
The general purpose of all these venues is (or purports to be) something other than providing opportunities for sex.
2 Some of the venues are purely public spaces (e.g., parks, beaches, alleys, and toilets), and some are commercial environments that can also serve as sex venues (e.g., adult bookstores, pornographic movie houses, back rooms of bars, and traditional Turkish or Japanese bathhouses). The variety of settings is large, but they generally allow participants to secure a minimum of privacy, at least in terms of not being harassed or interrupted. Since Humphreys' groundbreaking study 1 of sex between men in “tearooms” (public restrooms with a reputation as a place where homosexual encounters occur), social scientists have investigated the environments outside the home where men who have sex with men (MSM) meet other MSM for casual, usually anonymous, sex.