Reach through the tight pucker of time

^{Reach through the tight pucker of time; Feel their survival against your skin}

^{custom-made soap with towel in silk-screened bag; Riso-printed information card

edition of 129

5”h x 4″w x 2″d

2017}

^{“A little steam for tradition’s sake. But they made their own heat.” This box-set edition of the ephemera that should have been functions as both memorial homage and just-add-water toolkit. A risograph print collects a series of archival references describing the Everard Baths’ pleasures and dangers, abjection and enduring allure. A drawstring bag silkscreened with the edition’s title invites you to “Reach through the tight pucker of time; Feel their survival against your skin.” The bag opens to reveal an immodestly small towel, and a bar of soap—boasting the size of the baths and imprinted with a pair of crowns flanking Poseidon’s staff— to lather in celebration of the centenary the gay bathhouse would have had, if not shuttered in the early years of the AIDS crisis.

Issue Press | Printed Matter}

unwrapped soap bears the stamp of two crowns and a trident

white card with blue print, recto: A little steam for tradition’s sake. But they made their own heat. • It was true that, having no limits, thanks to penicillin, there seemed no way the escalation of drugs, muscles, ways to have sex, would stop. • And the walls of the rooms did not reach the ceiling - you could hear everything - you couldn’t not hear everything. Slurping and moaning and everybody’s dish about everybody • The Everard, for example, had established itself by the 1930s as the “classiest,” safest, and best known of the baths. • G[ore] V[idal]: I did take Truman to the Everard. Couldn’t have been funnier. “I just don’t like it.” [Mimics Truman Capote.] • the lonely and flesh-hungry from every corner of the nation and from every borough in the city • “That was pure sex and without the frills. No violins.” • Homosexuals Mobilize to Aid Fire Victims • “London, mon cher, is nothing compared to it…” • the stale reek of bodies, poppers, chlorine and marijuana • New York’s most enduring and notorious gay bathhouse, the Everard, occupied what was once the Church of Disciples of Christ […] James Everard converted it into Turkish, Roman, and Electric Baths in 1888 • But nothing at all was posted about AIDS and safe sex • And I often wanted to talk about my Everard adventures, but in those days you spoke to your gay friends about Ethel Merman • All the men were white • Society for the Suppression of Vice • It was hideous, like Kafka. There were wire-mesh walls, and the floors were filthy and stank, whereas the Continental Baths were like ancient Greece.” • The identities of those arrested tell us much about the clientele of the Everard. • where else but in a gay bathhouse “could you find a Park Avenue doctor and a Puerto Rican delivery boy, stripped of all outward appearances of social rank, naked in mutual need. • One night the Everard burned down. People died it was said, because the owners had not hooked sprinklers up. • It’s Sunday in September. I’ve just swallowed a couple of tetracyclines, having just climaxed with an improper stranger, and I’m relaxing in the sauna at Everard’s • V.D. Found Rising in Homosexuals: The free treatment and counseling provided by the city is currently available at the Club Baths at 24th Street and First Avenue, Everard Baths, 28th Street and Broadway and the Continental Baths on the 74th Street near Broadway. • In April last year, the Everard Spa, another bathhouse in Manhattan, was closed. • “We want to save lives,” the Mayor said. • In general one can say that the Turkish baths of America are a very safe place for homosexuals…The people one meets there have not come there to blackmail.” • ”’Faggots’ are given a certain amount of liberty in New York City,” said Michael Rhone, 26, “and most of that is to hang out in sleazy sorts of low places that are substandard. At a straight health spa, you wouldn’t have rooms partitioned halfway up the walls so the fire could spread.” • On weekend nights, there is almost always a waiting line after 10 PM, sometimes over an hour long for dormitory space and longer yet for rooms. • Persistent rumors that it was owned by the Police Athletic League • The Fellatorium • Because of the continuous inspections of the big 2nd Floor dormitory by the guards, the old daisy-chains and mass exhibitions are only memories.

white card with blue print, verso, signed and editioned: McCourt, James. Queer Street: Rise and Fall of an American Culture, 1947-1985. W.W. Norton, New York, 2004. p. 189. • Bergman, David. Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2009. p. 298 • McCourt p. 189. • Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Basic Books, New York, 1994. • Vidal, Gore, Richard Peabody, and Lucinda Ebersole. Conversations with Gore Vidal. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2005. p. 20. • Rumaker, Michael. A Day and Night at the Baths (1979) excerpted in David Bergman. Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2009. p. 360. • Quote by Howard? Parini, Jay. Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal. Doubleday, New York, 2015. p. 49. • Johnston, Laurie. “Homosexuals Mobilize to Aid Fire Victims.” The New York Times, 26 May, 1977. • Chauncey. • Woods. p. 360. • Dunlap, David W.. From Abyssinian to Zion : A Guide to Manhattan's Houses of Worship, Columbia University Press, 2012. p. 56. • Duberman, Martin. Hold Tight Gently : Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of AIDS, The New Press, 2014. p. 94. • Bell, Arthur. “The Bath Life Gets Respectability” Lavender Culture, edited by Karla Jay and Allen Young. NYU Press, New York, 1979. p. 77. • Chauncey. • Chauncey. • Kramer, Larry interviewed by Maer Roshan. “30th Anniversary Issue/ Larry Kramer: Queer Conscience.” New York Magazine, 6 April, 1998. • Chauncey. • Duberman. p. 94. • Bergman. p. 298. • Bell. p. 83. • Sheppard, Nathaniel, Jr. “V.D. Found Rising in Homosexuals.” The New York Times, 26 July 26, 1976. • Bronstein, Scott. “4 New York Bathhouses Still Operate Under City’s Program of Inspections.” The New York Times, 3 May, 1987. • Carroll, Maurice. “State Permits Closing of Bathhouses to Cut AIDS.” The New York Times, 26 October, 1985. • Chauncey. • Winfrey, Carey. “9 Killed by Fire at a West Side Bathhouse.” The New York Times, 26 May, 1977. • “Gaedicker’s Sodom-on-Hudson, Spring 1949.” Swasarnt Neuf’s Gay Guides for 1949, edited by Hugh Haglus. booklet, p. 33. • Chauncey. • “Gay Girl’s Guide to New York, Summer 1950 (Excerpts)” Swasarnt Neuf’s Gay Guides for 1949, edited by Hugh Haglus. booklet, p. 105. • Haglus, p. 105.