The movement to revive the classic bathhouse spirit in the US started in San Francisco – in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that bathhouses had not existed there since the city’s public health director notoriously ordered most of them to be closed in 1984, with the rest following suit thereafter. In 2004, DJ Bus Station John began decorating tiny, gritty dive bar Aunt Charlie’s with old bathhouse signs and pictures from vintage gay porn magazines for his weekly party, The Tubesteak Connection. He limited his music to the bathhouse era heyday, mainly 1974-1983, much of his vinyl inherited or sourced from gay men who had died from AIDS. The term “bathhouse disco” got attached to his style, and his parties now draw visitors from around the globe. Along with gay London DJ quartet Horse Meat Disco, whose popular excavations of the disco sound brought a wave of old school charm to larger dancefloors, the bathhouse disco movement encouraged a wave of fledgling gay crews in cities across the US to embrace the pre-AIDS past.

While many of these “new queer underground” crews forego a purely bathhouse disco sound in favor of cutting-edge techno, classic and acid house, they utilize vintage imagery and throw parties in historical gay spaces and current sex clubs, like Honcho’s Hot Mass parties beneath the Club Pittsburgh sex club, Honey Soundsystem’s parties at gay strip club Tea Room Theater and former Febe’s leather bar in SF, and Men’s Room’s farewell party to gay porn movie house Bijou Theatre during Chicago’s International Mr. Leather Weekend.

In a contemporary queer context, the bathhouse revival does come with some caveats, according to ethnomusicologist and specialist in queer dance music Dr. Luis-Manuel Garcia: “It’s super-important to remember that bathhouses [originally] were by and large exclusively male venues. Some larger cities offered mixed-gender nights, but otherwise the only way that women and trans folks found their way into these places was as service staff. This should give some pause, as we look back nostalgically to bathhouse culture; if present-day dance music events are going to take inspiration from bathhouses, promoters should be aware of the gender-exclusivity that was at the heart of most of these venues.

“In any case,” Garcia continued, “I’ve noticed over the past few years that more and more promoters and venues are building multi-purpose event spaces, where dancing mixes not just with sex, but with other kinds of socializing. For some promoters, the community-building aspect of this is quite explicit, while in others the goal seems to be simply creating a sort of utopian ‘garden of earthly delights,’ where different modes of partying can coexist and combine.“