![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2018\/03\/180302_Engel_Lyle_0186_LR.jpg\")
<\/a>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\u2019s gay bathhouses was an act of \u201cdignity taking\u201d from the gay community. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n
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 \u201cdignity taking\u201d: a confiscation of property, made without just compensation or legitimate public purpose, whose goal is to infantilize or dehumanize the affected group. (It’s a concept originated by Bernadette Atuahene, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.)<\/p>\n
Engel and Lyle presented their recent research as part of an interpretive series accompanying the college production of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches<\/a><\/em>. The lunchtime session in a Commons meeting room drew an enthusiastic capacity crowd, perhaps drawn in part by the talk\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n In June, the Chicago-Kent Law Review<\/em> 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. political and legal development and social movements, particularly involving LGBTQ issues.<\/p>\n What did the bathhouses mean to New York’s gay community in the mid-1980s? If many baths weren’t created \u201cfor the purpose of men to seek out sexual encounters with each other,\u201d Engel explained, \u201cby the turn of the 20th century, some became known as \u2018favorite spots\u2019 where same-sexual relations were not discouraged.<\/p>\n On Jan. 6, 1986, New Yorkers pass by the shuttered St. Mark\u2019s Baths in Greenwich Village. The institution was one of many gay bathhouses that the city closed in the 1980s as a response to the HIV\/AIDS crisis. The order to close is posted on the front door. (AP photo\/Rene Perez. Used with permission)<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cThey provided space for men to socialize with one another as identifiably gay men,\u201d Engel continued. \u201cThe gay bathhouse took on an even more symbolic value within the context of the 1970s when queer sex acts were articulated as a kind of liberation from heteronormative constraints.\u201d<\/p>\n In a way, the bathhouses served as community centers, offering films and live entertainment, hosting benefits, and offering voter registration and screenings for sexually transmitted infections. (Bette Midler, it was noted, still regards her early-career performances at the Continental Baths as some of her favorite gigs.)<\/p>\n “Unfortunately, public officials\u2019 first response to the crisis was to invade these community institutions as sites of the problem.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cIn short, the baths were sites of community and kinship formation that helped gay men to interact beyond the carnal.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet that role was never considered by the authorities, said Lyle, nor were \u201cqueer understandings of space, contact, intimacy, and belonging that animated these spaces.\u201d<\/p>\n “So to entertain any notion that these closures damaged the dignity of gay men, we must resist the urge to pathologize these public, anonymous, and casual sex institutions,\u201d Lyle said. \u201cBut unfortunately, public officials\u2019 first response to the crisis was to invade these community institutions as sites of the problem at the very time that [government was] underspending on HIV education, prevention, and resources for these communities under siege.\u201d<\/p>\n The closures and the public debate surrounding them \u201cviolated the dignity of gay men in a few different ways,\u201d Lyle said. The furor exacerbated a tendency to blame gay men for the epidemic. It overshadowed the gay community’s own substantial efforts to regulate the baths.<\/p>\n<\/a>