Gay bath house long beach

Before the AIDS epidemic, bathhouses acted as a community center. But with way more sex.

“To the left of me,” wrote David Colker for the Los Angeles Times in a 1994 article, “four men were having sex. Only two of them were actually looking at each other.”

So begins most bathhouse stories of the time. At the Compound, one of the Valley’s oldest establishments, porn would screen on the walls while patrons got it on in widespread (or private) rooms below. But not for extended. Even in 1994, the gay bathhouse’s days were numbered.

“A decade ago,” Colker writes, “Los Angeles boasted slick, high-tech bathhouses eminent throughout the gay society. But as the specter of AIDS darkened the mid-1980s, the baths came under fire as places where unsafe, multi-partner sex spread the disease.”

The Compound wasn’t the only spa coming under attack. It seemed that the more sexually open the bathhouse was, the more it would be targeted by law enforcement and political officials.

“The Corral Club…” according to the L.A. Times “had a community ‘orgy room’ with a minute stage where live sex shows took place, and several private rooms containing chains with wris