Sweating It Out

The history of experiencing life as a sweaty body in steamy queer spaces.

By Calvin GimpelevichFebruary 25, 2026

• Memoir & Essay

• Gender & Sexuality

IN 2017, MY FRIEND Nate bought a condo. The unit was one of 12 divided between two buildings and set in a concrete lot. There were no special amenities, no gym or lounge or bike room, no shared space beyond stairwells and basement laundry, so when he got a tour and the maintenance guy referred to a nondescript door as the sauna, Nate thought it a joke. The closet—for that’s what it was—had ladders, boxes, old paint. It took a year for him to notice the dial outside, to realize it was a sauna, demoted to storage for common supplies. He cleared the room out, tested the heat, and discovered it worked. A functioning Finnish sauna with cedar benches and rocks on which to make steam. Every gathering at Nate’s became a sauna party. I spent the next winter sweating through all his nice towels.

Seattle had a period of heavy Nordic migration, which perhaps explains why a modest building contained what most Americans would consider a luxurious frill. In addition to logging, fishing, and shipping, one of the draws to those Nordic migrants was that Seattle gets cold. The grayness and trees and climate reminded them of home. Some Finns or Swedes found saunas hygienic and necessary. Their customs were worked into residential constructions that eventually fell into disuse. By the time Nate came along, the sauna was so forgotten that his broker hadn’t even listed it as a feature.

In my whole decade in the Pacific Northwest, I never lived anywhere with decent heating, but I hardly noticed. I’ve never had an easy relationship with physicality, and it was easy to ignore the persistent discomfort of cold. You could blame the sense of distance on disability (chronic pain) or being transgender (dysphoria), but I think it is at least partially temperamental. My mind spirals toward abstraction, more easily concerned with a 17th-century philosopher, for instance, than if I have eaten that day. Several times in high school, I arrived with shirts inside out; once, I managed this with blue jeans. The baffling truth—or paradox—of my life is that we have bodies, are bodies, perhaps, and not discorporate spirits.

I wonder if this is obvious for other people. It seems to be for my friends who are actively, physically engaged with the world. Friends who do not bump into objects, as I do, who notice when the smoke detector beeps and rush to put out fires instead of gazing, distractedly, at the flaming dishrag, as I might, as if it had nothing to do with me. If I am ever in a war, put me in back with the code breakers—or, better yet, the army chaplains. No one is more likely to freeze and float above necessary action, thinking about a quote by Tolstoy, forgetting I have a rifle.

Unfortunately, I have realized that there is no real happiness to be found beyond tenancy in one’s form. Huge swaths of my life have gone toward making my body something I inhabit (or notice inhabiting), as opposed to something dragging behind. The first shot of testosterone did what psych meds could not for my mood. Surgery, exercise, and pursuing physical health supported this process. Sitting in hot little rooms.

So I went to Nate’s and—this is important—sweated with other people. Alone, my thoughts wound toward discorporate heights. With people, I stayed on the ground. We’d sit on the dual benches that, squeezing, fit three people each, and pour water onto the heated rocks and breathe steam until the flushed and dampened body reared its head to say: This is a little too much. Then we’d huddle outside, barefoot on blue industrial carpet. If it was winter, we might rush out as a kind of cold plunge before returning, cycling cold, hot, cold, hot, cold, hot with ever-lengthening time outside, until it didn’t seem tempting to sit in that box anymore. It would feel almost heroic, standing relaxed and nearly naked, in a refreshing drizzle, as others rushed by in their coats.

¤

My first book deal fell through. It’s not uncommon. The arts are littered with broken promises, and I’ve had other books and films and podcasts vanish since. I was in my twenties, in Seattle, and before it fell through, when I was full of optimism about my literary future, the publisher met with me on a trip from New York. He was involved with a woman in Seattle, which I knew because of the incestuous social-professional tangling of the queer publishing world.

The first meeting happened in a café, the second at Steamworks, a gay men’s bath, where the publisher got us a room. He paid for our membership—30 days—which was necessary for some sheltering legal reasons; for our entry fee; and for the most expensive room, with a porn TV in addition to a standard bed, and we got locker keys on elastic wristbands, along with white towels, worn around the waist, with nothing else, as mandatory uniform.

We were there because I had taken the “bath” part of men’s bathhouses literally. One of the stories in my book took place during the 1980s police raid of Toronto bathhouses known as “Operation Soap.” I included hot tubs in my description, along with other mistakes, having never been to a gay bath. There are no baths in bathhouses. They’re steam rooms, with bedrooms, showers, furnished corners, and lounges. He thought it would be fun, and funny, to take our meeting at a men’s bath and see what we’d see.

It was a weekday evening. The baths were nearly empty. We went to the room, changed into our towels, flicked through a few channels of the porn TV, got immediately bored, and went to the sauna, whose temperature ran cool. The point wasn’t to stress your system to detoxification; it was to be warm and misty and facilitate sexual encounters. No one entered for most of our conversation, until eventually an attractive man did. He sat across from us and stared at me, hopefully, while the publisher and I talked editing. In our towels, I doubt the stranger knew we were trans, though I’m not sure it would have mattered if he did. The bathhouse has a formally inclusive policy.

The publisher asked if I wanted some privacy with my suitor and I said no. I didn’t want to have sex with anyone at the bathhouse. I wanted to publish a book. These things were not mutually exclusive, but one far outweighed the other. I wanted to crystallize the reality of that place into fiction and for that fiction to be good. I felt like a debutante: coming out as a writer, as a man in men’s space. And I enjoyed sitting in the steam room—so much warmer than my apartment—in the convivial company of others, unburdened by clothes. There were mirrors all over the place for you to see yourself and others in the mysterious low light, which, along with the lack of clothes, homogenized patrons to a population of bodies scrubbed of distinguishing marks. It was a place designed to make people into bodies. Sensualized, immediate bodies. The red lights, the lack of windows or clocks, and the looping clubby techno all created a ceaseless present in which one could easily get lost.

¤

If I’ve had trouble with my body, I am not the only one. Every day, it seems, op-eds, sermons, and legislative bills excoriate bodies like mine. To understand them, it might be useful to place my personal history in the context of time.

As a teenager in the early 2000s, I found a polished, public-facing gay and lesbian political consciousness focused on legalizing gay marriage. To trans people, the message was Let us get marriage, military service, adoption, and the ability to be openly gay politicians, and then we’ll come back for you. Transsexuals were treated like less palatable cousins, whose struggles were notable but whose visibility might turn the general populace against gay rights. There was an emphasis on the respectability of certain gay couples—monogamous for decades, married in all but legality; on the separation of church and state; and on parallels with the injustices of racial segregation. When I was 19, Proposition 8 overturned a brief court-ordered window of marriage equality in California. Seven years later, the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

In the world I was in, at that point, there was a fair amount of bitterness around the LGBT hate-crime statistics that were being used to rouse pity and funds for organizations focused on gay issues. These organizations, often fronted by white moneyed gay men, got their emotional punch from atrocities committed against poor trans women of color. I attended many social events that opened with readings of names of the trans women murdered that year, among people cognizant that little was actually being done.

The only place that seemed truly welcoming of trans people was the anarchic queer Left, who were unimpressed by marriage (judged heteronormative and bourgeois). This was a culture subsisting off bartending, tattooing, barista gigs, and sex work; active in protest against prisons and policing; containing a surprising number of academics; opposed to colonialism; in favor of solidarity, coalitions, and all kinds of minority rights. A culture that appeared, sometimes, like a parody of the political Left, but where I conducted most of my life. It was a culture in which it seemed normal and appropriate to have an editorial meeting in a gay bathhouse. Sometimes I loved it; sometimes I fantasized about joining a monastery or becoming a hermit to escape. It was the first and only social realm to welcome me as I was.

And then the winds changed. Having attained marriage and military service, mainstream liberal LGBT orgs did indeed seem to be shifting toward trans concerns. Universities and tech companies added gender care to their health insurance, less progressive corporations and Medicaid followed. It seemed, anecdotally, as if young people were less likely to lose their parents or be forced to mimic a “normal” gender; access to hormones and blockers enabled more youth to bypass the 10-year sheet of depression that covered the period between my first puberty and the second like ice. No longer would transness exile people from the lives that their circumstances and backgrounds might otherwise promise.

Now the winds have shifted again. We are in what I think of as the great scapegoating, where Republicans demonize trans folk as terrorist monsters committed to the destruction of anything natural, sacred, or good, and Democrats blame us for losing the election to Donald Trump—asking, openly, if it wouldn’t be more expedient to jettison trans rights, which are perhaps going too far after all. In a characteristic New York Times essay, published in June 2025, conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan opined that, having achieved its core objectives—marriage equality and “the end of H.I.V. in the United States as an unstoppable plague”—gay and lesbian organizers made the mistake of undertaking “a new and radical gender revolution […] aimed to dissolve natural distinctions between men and women in society, to replace biological sex with gender identity in the law and culture.” Bemoaning the lack of perceived centricity of lesbians and gays in LGBT conversation, speaking of trans people as fundamentally separate from gays and lesbians (whose concerns should dominate the conversation), he writes, “The gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple liberal equality and mutual respect—live and let live. Reform, not revolution,” before asking if “a vote […] or even a poll of gay men and lesbians” was taken to include trans concerns.

The fear, hovering throughout the piece, is that social backlash against trans issues will reverberate back to gay ones, and civil rights gains such as marriage will be lost. It’s a logic I recognize from the liberal politics I was first exposed to—that rights will slowly expand from the simplest to socially assimilate to the most challenging, until everyone has an equal shot at a comfortable life. Poor Black undocumented trans woman sex workers might not be in the civil rights circle just yet, but eventually, as protections extend from the more privileged queers, society will get there. (As opposed to the radical argument I was exposed to later: that if you center the needs of the most marginalized, everyone else will get carried along.) The circle will shrink—or break—if expanded too far.

Sullivan’s views of gay activism, and of homosexuality as innately distinct from trans politics, are, of course, ahistoric. There were points, in the United States, when sexual and gender difference were collapsed into one. Speaking of “fairies” and “inverts” in the early 20th century, historian George Chauncey writes, “Sexual desire for men was held to be inescapably a woman’s desire, and the inverts’ desire for men was not seen as an indication of their ‘homosexuality’ but as simply one more manifestation of their fundamentally womanlike character.” It was considered normal and natural for “conventionally masculine males, who were regarded as men,” to have sex with both women and fairies, so long as they played the active (penetrative) role. Chauncey continues:

Dr. William Lee Howard argued in 1904 that the inverts’ “sexual desire for their—apparent—own sex” was “really a normal sexual feeling,” because the inverts were actually women (who naturally desired men) even though they appeared to be men (for whom such desire would have been perverted). He explained this apparent paradox by asserting that although the inverts had male bodies, they had female brains, and by reminding his readers that the brain, rather than the anatomy, was “the primary factor” in classifying the sex of a person.

To a modern ear, the discussion seems closer to transgender issues than to gay ones, but the fairies Chauncey writes of were not attempting gender transition. People we would consider (independently and possibly overlappingly) as gay, trans, or intersex were collapsed into a third sex, for which the term “invert” was a catchall.

Political agitation likewise changed in different periods, among different people, in membership, scope, and goal. There were points when gay and lesbian issues were combined or separated, when transness belonged to a continuum that included gayness, when assimilation into middle-class respectability was of the utmost importance, and when attempts to define a separate queer culture were paramount.

Historian Jules Gill-Peterson argues that there are fissures even within modern trans communities, that “the real antagonism concealed within the movement for transgender rights since the 1990s is class-based.” She notes that “the material struggle to transition has given way to the concerns of a small transgender professional class who have popularized their own interests and values as if they were universally emancipatory,” and that “there was a pointed political confrontation [in the 1990s] between middle-class transgender politics and working-class transsexual politics. The strongest materialist critiques were often tendered by transsexual women who understood transition’s downward mobility.” Discussing Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, who played central roles in the Stonewall riots and subsequent gay liberation movement, Gill-Peterson, in A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024), writes:

Rivera and Johnson are often celebrated today as trans women of color, as if that were a clear-cut category that was different from gay men. However, neither of them made that sort of distinction at the time. In an interview recorded at the end of 1970, both use a range of different words to describe themselves, including gay, drag queen, and transvestite. Indeed, for many street queens, the philosophical difference between being gay and trans was irrelevant. […] More importantly, the concrete conditions of their lives weren’t organized around a difference between gender and sexuality. Cross-dressing was illegal, and so was sex work—and both were based entirely on public perception. The police didn’t much care whether someone identified as a woman or a gay man; in jail, they would be treated horrifically either way. As such, it didn’t much matter how they felt on the inside, or what words they used to describe themselves. When they came to organizing under the banner of STAR, Rivera and Johnson saw themselves as true adherents to the gay liberation movement, rather than a separatist trans movement.

The arguments for and against gay marriage, in my teen years, often looked back for proof that gay people have always existed or that they have always been an abomination, just as those arguments often looked to the animal kingdom for instances of homo- or overwhelming heterosexuality, as if there were a deistic objective nature representing absolute truth and divine intention instead of a messy field containing everything from harems to incest to the cannibalizing of one’s children to hermaphroditism and parthenogenesis. We come from the past, but we can only see it from our own time.

¤

“Each week we all play a game,” Morgan M. Page wrote following a unanimous UK Supreme Court ruling last spring that trans women are not legally considered women.

The game is: Which country is safe now? My friends and I keep tabs open in our browsers—visa requirements for Spain, Argentina, Japan. We think about the relative stability of that country, its ranking on the annual collation of murder rates towards us, what languages we might reasonably be able to learn. […]

No longer being legally women, we un-women are left to wonder: Will we face arrest for using public toilets? Is there any purpose left at all to legally changing one’s gender via the Gender Recognition Act if it has no effect on any aspect of how we are treated in law, in prisons, or even in which hospital ward we are placed in? What will life be like for those who now exist outside the law—who will we become and how will we live?

For the first time in my memory, there is serious talk about emigration among trans people I know. Most of these people are in the United States and most of their concerns relate to political attacks wrought by the second coming of Donald Trump. Some have left for fairer climates; others find the fear overblown. Whether or not emigration makes sense, we are clearly in a tightening moment, where the Trump administration (and others) are attempting to criminalize and legislate away the viability of trans existence—which will not make anyone less trans, just poorer, more dysphoric, at a higher risk of hate crimes, with less access to medical treatment, more incarcerated, and more stressed.

I am feeling the stress. It’s different from the stresses of my early transition, when trans folk of my demographic were viewed, more generally, as unemployable freaks rather than active politicized threats—and it’s a stress that is personally abstract, built from headlines, about what might happen. What does it mean, for example, when a transfeminine friend has her passport stolen and the replacement comes with the sex listed as male, outing her to anyone who asks to see an ID? What will happen as minors lose access to healthcare? I am feeling it despite my membership in one of the most privileged groups beneath the trans umbrella—white, male, and possessing dual citizenship with Europe—a subset that has eluded the violence clinging, in statistically significant numbers, to Black and Brown trans women. And I am finding, once again, how palliative queer spaces are.

Saunas are among the few public places where I still feel limited by transition. Partially, this is because it feels disgusting to sweat in nylon swim trunks whose material sticks to my thighs; I prefer to sit nude. Partially it is because the whole point of the experience is to relax in the body I have, and this is difficult to do if there is any tension about how I might be received. There are places where I’m ready to engage with the inevitable conflicts of human difference, but baths aren’t one. Ideally, baths are havens. Chauncey writes, in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994) that “the safest, most enduring, and one of the most affirmative of the settings in which gay men gathered in the first half of the twentieth century was the baths.” In addition to mixed gay and straight baths, whose management tolerated discreet homosexual activity, there were purely gay baths, prioritizing gay wants:

The most stable of gay institutions, they outlasted every gay bar and restaurant in the city and provided a place safe from police and vigilantes alike in which to meet other gay men. Forthrightly sexual in character, the baths were also important social centers, where gay men could meet openly, discuss their lives, and build a circle of friends.

These were shut down in the 1980s by New York City’s Department of Health, at the height of the HIV epidemic, but baths in other cities—like Seattle’s Steamworks—survived.

Professors Stephen M. Engel and Timothy S. Lyle describe New York’s baths as sites of community and kinship extending beyond carnality, including dance floors, cabarets, live music, and the showing of campy movies. They even “hosted benefits for the Gay Activists Alliance and provided onsite STD testing; the New St. Mark’s Bath in the East Village also worked with the League of Women Voters to register gay men to vote.” These locations functioned as counterpublics—“alternative spaces that probe and resist normativity to offer subordinated communities different possibilities and divergent logics,” enabling “a cultural belonging that was not readily available elsewhere.” Engel and Lyle quote author Michael Rumaker’s 1979 paean to New York’s Everard Baths:

Here, we were our naked selves, anonymous, wearing only our bodies, with no other identity than our bare skins, without estrangements of class or money or position, or false distinctions of any kind, not even names if we chose none. Myself, the other naked men here, were the bare root of hunger and desire, our prime need to be held, touched and touching, feeling, if only momentarily, the warmth and affectionate response of another sensuous human. Here, was the possibility to be nourished and enlivened in the blood—heat and heartbeat of others, regardless of who or what we were. Nurturing others we nurture ourselves.

And yet the baths, like all other places, had imperfections. Some bodies were more welcome than others. All but one of New York’s gay baths were racially segregated prior to the 1960s, refusing admittance to Black men, and the Everard’s one-dollar admission fee, Chauncey notes, “was sufficiently high to preclude visits by the great mass of workingmen.” Early 20th-century men’s baths are certainly not places that I, possessed of a time machine, could go.

Women’s baths are no simpler. My first experience of any sauna, pre-transition, was at Osento—an iconic feminist institution from the early 1980s, wherein a sliding scale Japanese-style communal bathhouse was installed in a San Francisco Victorian row house. When I was a young lesbian in the Bay Area, Osento seemed like a place I should go. At that point, I probably would have preferred sex with a stranger to an indie book deal, but Osento was explicitly chaste. Journalist Meredith Talusan writes:

Before Osento, my main association with baths was as a gay man cruising in London bathhouses. […] Those men’s spaces always felt so sexually charged, every interaction or touch tinged with erotic possibility. Osento felt radically different; it made me feel as though going from man to woman really was like moving to the opposite pole of a magnet, the way women looked and smiled openly at each other, unlike men’s baths where a direct glance was a marker of desire. And I felt no hesitation about resting a head on Anna’s shoulder or grasping the hand of any of a number of close friends, a marker of intimacy that felt taboo in men’s spaces except as a precursor to sexual contact.

Trans presence was a complication. I could be there because I hadn’t transitioned (precluding enjoyment of the situation, because I was incapable of relaxing before transition), and Talusan could be there, in the early 2000s, because she’d had genital surgery—the requirement Osento gave for trans women’s access. The policy came with rift and boycott: certain patrons did not wish for any trans women’s presence; others, critical of a policy requiring expensive, invasive surgery, demanded expanded access. Complications arose at the second women’s bathhouse I encountered when one of the owners transitioned from female to male. Their policy disallowed transmasculine folk post–medical intervention, which now included the owner, who had to dart in for maintenance during off-hours, or when the baths were empty.

¤

My book deal fell through slowly. The publisher stopped responding to my emails. Stopped responding to texts and calls. I was not alone in this, I found out later. The press disappeared. I waited for the publisher to respond to my edits, waited for any contact as deadlines passed, and the reality of a book coming out became less and less sure. It seemed I had imagined the whole thing—and I reread the contract, pathetically, a few times to prove to myself that the offer had actually happened. Rejection would have hurt, but its absence was crushing. I did not understand how this could happen in our tight-knit little queer world.

Trans people fail each other. They do it, as Gill-Peterson notes, because lines of class and race and culture persist, their power to fracture and divide unchanged. After all, trans people are no wiser or more inherently virtuous than anyone else; they are as jealous, resilient, supportive, petty, and biased as other humans. Our humanness does not melt from the heat of shared gender trouble.

¤

A few years ago, aged 34, I stumbled across a flyer for a pop-up called Queer Spa. The interdisciplinary artist v. nico d’entremont had negotiated with the proprietor of a Russian steam bath to allow a monthly trans and gender nonconforming event. For most of its 120 years in business, the steam bath had only served men, but through the vagaries of inheritance and marriage, ownership of the Russian Jewish men’s business passed to an Italian American woman. The proprietor, Lisa, introduced Ladies Night on Mondays and was open to a queer gathering (after assurances that the intention was not an orgy).

By the second event, with almost no advertising, the saunas were packed, and by the fourth or fifth, the building hit legal capacity. Visibly trans people filled the concrete dry room, which felt like a bunker or very clean crypt, and the steam room, like an enormous, tiled shower. They were in towels, on seats in the lounge, and naked in the open gang shower. Not everyone was trans, but the majority clearly were.

The pop-up’s creator, d’entremont, had been introduced to saunas 15 years prior, through Korean spas in Los Angeles. The businesses were, in their words, a “gender segregated space. It’s a binary gender. You go in and if you’re a man you get one color T-shirt and if you’re a woman you get another color T-shirt and the T-shirts are for when you’re in the mixed gender area upstairs but in the gender segregated areas you just have total nudity basically.” The spas are family-friendly, with people, including children, of all ages. The extremes of heat and cold, the relaxed environment, gave d’entremont a “corporeal freedom and relation in connection to [their] body that was new.” They had been dreaming, since then, of a place where they could see and be seen by community, where they could feel “immersed in queer community” while being openly trans.

One of the most frequent sentiments expressed by bathhouse fans is an appreciation for the illustration of the range of human bodies. I often find statements like Meredith Talusan’s: “I saw such a range of body sizes and shapes that my compass for what a woman’s body looks like was permanently reoriented.” In our conversations, d’entremont talked about a desire for this same thing, because “as a trans person [they] don’t get to see what other trans bodies look like in a nonsexual space”—which is particularly glaring when transness often comes with physical change. They wanted, like the Korean spas, to create an intergenerational space that also showed the transitions of age.

At 42 and 34, respectively, d’entremont and I were older than most of the people who came to those early Queer Spas. Many participants were newly on hormones, and I realized, just by sitting there, naked, that I was expressing what their bodies might become. I remembered the first time I saw a naked trans man, on a queer camping trip, in the first months of my second puberty—how jealous I was of his comfort, and how he illustrated potentials that I had not, until that moment, truly believed. I could feel the eyes of queer people on me in the baths and realized it didn’t matter, really, how I thought of myself or what anyone’s rhetoric was. Just by being together, in that temporary refuge, we co-created a world.

¤

Featured image: Utagawa Toyokuni I, A Public Bath House, ca. 1790s. Clarence Buckingham Collection, Art Institute Chicago (1925.3145). CC0, artic.edu. Accessed February 23, 2026. Image has been cropped.