Interim Staff
Hamilton’s “gay community” is up in arms after a multi-agency task force inspected a bathhouse in the city in August – even though the facility was just one of 14 businesses visited by the force that same night. The reverberations are being felt in Toronto, where gays there pledged to get involved and sympathetic media outlets ran coverage.
A team of police, public health, building/licensing, fire and alcohol/gaming personnel visited the businesses, including the Warehouse Spa and Bath. According to bathhouse owner Jamie Bursey, police “started arresting within 30 seconds” (for indecent acts) and handed him two tickets for smoking by-law infractions. He charged that things would have been different if his had been a “straight” establishment.
A Hamilton police spokesperson, however, said the inspections were not conducted according to sexual orientation or ethnicity, and that the task force has conducted over 400 inspections since it started. The force usually shows up unannounced at an establishment once or twice a week. Sometimes, the inspections are conducted at random; at other times, they take place because of community concerns, Crimestoppers tips or police intelligence. At the Warehouse, the inspection was apparently triggered by a citizen complaint of unsanitary conditions.
Those explanations weren’t good enough for the gays, however, who angrily said they felt violated and unsafe because of the inspection.
“There are very few spaces in town where you feel, as a queer member of the community, that you can be yourself and just do your thing and not have to worry about your space being violated,” Lyla Miklos, of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender advisory committee, told the Hamilton Spectator newspaper.
But Hamilton police deputy chief Tom Marlor told the Spectator that two men allegedly committed indecent acts in a common area of the bathhouse in front of other people. “We did not go to charge men who were having sex, but when we found men who were having sex, we had to lay charges … I can’t say it won’t happen again.”
For gays, the bathhouse offers a “haven” for sex. Bursey told the Spectator he opened the bathhouse in 2002 because it was felt the facility was “something that the city desperately needed.” He added that most clients are upper-middle class straight men living straight lives, who need anonymity.
“A lot of men come in to chitchat with other men and, of course, they come for other reasons as well,” he said coyly.
The Spectator reported that three video rooms and a television in his building play a constant flow of adult gay videos. One room in the back has absolutely no light (it is said to be common in gay bars and bathhouses). A bondage room has chains hanging from the ceiling. Another area has a maze of oddly shaped wood panels and ropes.
Downstairs, in a dozen “private rooms,” anything goes. “What (clients) do in there is their business. It’s perfectly legal,” said Bursey. Condoms are supplied by Hamilton’s public health department.
Some elements in Toronto’s gay “community” have jumped into the fray. In that city, a “protocol” has been established whereby police may enter areas of bathhouses licensed for liquor, but may not enter spas, fetish rooms, cubicles, video rooms and pools without a search warrant. And pro-gay media, such as Hamilton’s View magazine, and Toronto’s Eye and Xtra!, have covered developments by taking the angle that police and inspecting officials are being oppressive.
On the other hand, a number of letter writers to the Spectator say they fully support the actions of public officials.
“It boggles my mind as to why people protesting about the so-called raid on a bathhouse last week think they are being targeted,” said one writer. “Does this bathhouse, and the people who frequent it, think that they are exempt from city laws and by-laws?”
“I’m guessing if two heterosexuals were having sex in a club lobby when the police arrived (for whatever reason), they too would be arrested,” wrote another.
Bathhouses date back to the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans, who used them as centres of intellectual debate and communal gathering. In North American cities during the 1800s and early 1900s – before running water – bathhouses served as sanitary refuges. Afterwards, as bathing became a more private function, bathhouses became the domain of those seeking gay sex.
