In a Bathhouse Meant for Cis Gay Men, Trans Is Transgressive

“The Club” by Jarek Steele

The club is situated in a warehouse district near downtown St. Louis, a low building with turn-of-the-century brickwork that looks like every other low brick building in the city, surrounded by weedy parking lots and rusty chain link fences. When my friend Steven invited me to soak in the hot tub with him there, I had to Google it to make sure it was what I thought it was. Honestly, I’d thought that bathhouses were a relic of the Time Before, when men ducked into gay saunas to have anonymous sex without the fear of AIDS. I grew up in the eighties and nineties and knew only the Time After, when the crusades to shut them down in cities like San Francisco and New York underscored the fear of the plague and the drive to exterminate queerness rather than caring for the sick. That fear crept into my Midwestern Southern Baptist existence and made every queer person a gay man, wasting away, an ominous cautionary tale, body poison to everyone around him. I could only see the view from the TV at the Days Inn, where I cleaned rooms; from there, queer joy was as removed—as irrelevant—as Broadway, Wall Street, and Hollywood. It sparkled in this forbidden way. 

The Club, a block away from a Mobile station and a Store Space Self Storage, didn’t sparkle. Still, I was curious.

Bathhouses are a quintessential part of gay culture, specifically cis male gay culture. In the last century, these places have served as safe(ish) places for gay men to have intimate time with other men, secluded from the life and career-demolishing eyes of the police. But times had long since changed. Steven is an activist and an irrepressible extrovert who can talk his way into nearly anything; he was determined to break down the barriers for trans and nonbinary people in all places, even decades-old bathhouses. He was in the process of convincing the owners and management of The Club that all people who identify as male should be allowed equal access to the sauna, workout room, lounge and entertainment area, swimming pool, hot tub, and, you know, everything else. While this may not be revolutionary on the coasts, Missouri is different. His success led to an offer of a test mission, and he needed a wingman, which is how I became the first trans man to get naked in this gay bathhouse.

In my mind’s eye, I saw a sort of Queer as Folk situation where hot guys in their twenties walk around in white towels and spontaneously fuck each other, devoid of inhibition. While a lot of this was true, it wasn’t meant for my eyes, the eyes of a man who was assigned female at birth. 

Steven and I were both in our forties, both balding with beards (although he had more hair), both having had top surgery. We were different in other ways. Steven surrounded himself with queerness, and nearly every aspect of his life included people in various versions of gender. He avoided tricky situations like doctors and locker rooms, whereas I was, and am still, nearly always the only trans person in the room. I had undressed quickly and guardedly in the YMCA for years, and it amazed me that not one guy in the very straight YMCA locker room had ever looked past my tattoos and bald head to see the incision marks on my chest or the significantly different anatomy between my legs. It seemed like if I kept moving and directed them where to look, they’d see whatever I wanted them to see. Even so, women have an ingrained sense of danger when it comes to male proximity, and I’d spent the first thirty years of my life in a body that housed a uterus and even a child in that uterus. I knew when to be uncomfortable.

Maintaining the illusion that I was just like every other man took up giant swaths of bandwidth in my head. I packed my underwear with all sorts of soft representations of a penis over the years, and when that grew tiresome, I just wore loose pants, sat in a slouch, and walked like the guys I saw at Lowe’s when I bought lumber for woodworking projects. I diverted attention. It wasn’t about being closeted. I had been a very visible trans man for over a decade. It was about something closer. Something infinitely intimate and unknowable.

Sex was complicated. It was all fantasy, like virtual reality where I was all of the avatars—the person touching, the person being touched, the person looking, the person being looked at—while I stayed locked behind the screen. And nowhere was this collection of avatars more present than when I tried strap-ons. As much as I wished I could have wrestled my mind around wearing one, they made me disconnect completely, like I was fucking by proxy. What I wanted was uncomplicated. I didn’t need acrobatic sex or a million orgasms. I just wanted to be in the room.

 But every second spent locating the equipment in a drawer, adjusting straps, wiping off the inevitable bit of fuzz from the pouch or stray cat hair that stuck itself to the shaft, and then wrestling it into place on my body was a pace away from being in my actual body. By the time I had suited up, I was already thinking about the grocery list and wishing it was over. It wasn’t just about sex, though. I lived from my shoulders up in pretty much every respect. Even alone in the shower or getting dressed in the morning, I mostly didn’t look down, which over the course of a few years translated to not being able to look in the mirror and then not being able to look at anyone else, at least not directly and not for very long. Sex was the least of my worries. I had nearly erased myself completely.

I drove to The Club and sat in the parking lot with both hands on my steering wheel. A scene from National Lampoon’s Vacation repeated unbidden in my head. Chevy Chase’s dorky dad character is about to go skinny dipping with Christy Brinkley’s character and keeps repeating to himself, “This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy.”  I texted my sister, not just because I wanted to talk to her about being parked outside a bathhouse, but because she is the only one I know who has memorized the same scenes from movies we watched as kids.  

“This is the gayest thing I’ve ever done,” I texted. I looked in my rearview mirror and made eye contact with a middle-aged man walking behind my truck into the building. 

“I want details,” she texted back.

It was not the gayest thing I’d ever done. My sexuality has careened widely between asexual and pansexual for as long as I can remember, and even though I struggled with it when I was younger, I don’t stress anymore about where I am on that spectrum at any given time. I’d had anonymous sex in strange places, but those experiences were in a female body, not the very male body I inhabit now. It had been a long time since I felt much of anything besides crushing depression while fighting to have the surgery and then bone-deep fatigue from months of recovery from the surgery. For the past year, I had felt more like a list of symptoms than a human being.

That Tuesday morning, I planned on getting naked in the hot tub, knowing that Steven wouldn’t. In a cis gay bathhouse, trans is transgressive, and cock is, if not required, expected. Unlike me, he had no interest in bottom surgery. 

There are a few different kinds of bottom surgeries. Each method gives you different sizes and sensations. Some give you the ability to pee standing up and have penetrative sex. Some are more involved than others. I chose phalloplasty, which is a surgery that constructs a penis out of donated skin, nerve, and arterial tissue from other parts of the patient’s body.

Most trans men don’t have bottom surgery of any kind, and even fewer have phalloplasty. Many don’t feel they need it. Many do feel they need it but can’t afford it or are scared of it. The surgery is a big deal, involving multiple locations on the body—the arm, the thigh, the back, the groin, depending on where the donor site is—and there are almost always complications. People get creeped out by the scar on the donor arm, which looks like a very large burn that extends from your wrist to nearly your elbow, but it’s not just aesthetics. I had physical therapy to get full use of my hand again. I can’t feel anything on the scar. I’ve cut my arm on several occasions and not known it until I noticed blood. But most hesitation is about presentation. Many trans men want a perfectly formed penis with perfect length and girth (a dream of many cis men), and they will settle for no less than flawlessness with zero visible scars (good luck with that). The internet is filled with sites where you can see surgery photos, and those comment sections are filled with people who cringe, or worse, laugh at images of The Results—as if the trans man in question didn’t nail the landing, so points must be deducted.

I can understand the trepidation. I had a lot of it before my surgery. I had convinced myself that bottom surgery was an option that would give me even more to be self-conscious about. I had built up the Frankenstein’s monster version of The Results in my head, and that kept me distracted until a friend came home from having his own phalloplasty and offered to show it to me. I figured I’d look in real life and definitively close the door on any desire to do it. We sat next to each other on his living room couch, and he unzipped his pants. Instead of the monster I had imagined, I saw a living, breathing, normal person with a very much not scary Result.

Fuck. I thought. The next day I started researching surgeons. 

Fifteen years after I started taking testosterone, and ten years after I started pushing my health insurance to cover the surgery, I finally completed and healed from my phalloplasty, which had left me with a penis, scars hidden under scars from other surgeries, scars hidden under hair, scars in plain view, and a skin graft on my arm. 

I didn’t look cis, but in a dark room, I might be okay. The bigger truth, though, was that I didn’t just want to be okay. I wanted to be wanted. I thought about the guy in my rearview mirror. I wondered if we’d recognize each other in the dark. I wondered if I’d want to make out with someone. I wondered if I’d feel anything at all.

I wasn’t sure how Steven and I would be received at The Club. This was our inaugural visit, and I had no idea what was required. I was following his lead – and yet I had come without swim trunks. He pulled in just as I was texting an lol to my sister. He clutched his shorts in his hand. He’s a big guy. He carries his weight like a bear daddy, and I’d always thought he was attractive. I carry my weight like a secret and hide it under layers of clothes when I’m heavy. I’d just lost 34 lbs, though, and was feeling as good as I ever have, but my body and I have a complicated relationship.

“I’m nervous,” I said. “Why am I so nervous?” I knew exactly why I was nervous.

“I am too.” He shifted his shorts from one hand to the other. We smiled and shook our heads at each other. This is crazy. This is crazy. This is crazy.

Once we were in, I felt like I had in the dressing room of the strip club where my sister tended bar in her early twenties, the 40-61 Club. Littered with gym bags, lingerie, and drugs, it was easy to slip in the back and hang out with the other dancers while I waited for her shift to be over. Those friendships and flirtations didn’t count because I was a woman. There were rules for that club too. The bouncer never told me to leave but never asked me to dance. The bathhouse felt like slipping into an old pair of jeans.

Porn played on multiple screens. The manager, Mike, gave us a casual tour of the place while I tried to avoid the impulse to take out my phone and take notes. 

“These are useful,” he said. He put his knee up on one of the benches in the hallway and rocked back and forth. “Fuck benches.” He looked at me, expecting me to cringe. When I nodded for him to continue, he took us past the glory holes and the “slurp deck,” which was a platform that a person could stand on and put their crotch at face level for the person standing in front of them. Then he showed us the private rooms. Each stop on the tour was accompanied by a disgruntled look from Mike. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to shock us into leaving or if it was a sort of adolescent dare. We twisted through the dark hallways and made our way back to the locker room. I put my key into the locker and stripped off my shirt and pants. 

Standing in The Club in my socks and underwear, I felt the familiar reflex to hurry and to hide. I thought about a night two years earlier, before my surgery, when, in a suicidal depression, I went to the psych ward of a hospital and was confronted by two nurses—one man and one woman—who directed me to strip so they could do a “skin search.” I thought about the time years before that in intensive care when the nurse called me “it” and “forgot” to give me a blood transfusion. I thought about every time I had the instinct to hold my breath, to shrink into the shadows, like the air around me didn’t belong to me, and if I only took a little, if I stayed there pleasant and quiet, suffocating for long enough, my stillness would protect me. Here though, in this locker room in this strange place, the sun came out. The air was okay to breathe again.  

 I took off my socks and underwear, stowed my clothes in the locker, and looked back at Steven. He was hurrying to put on his swimming trunks in that familiar YMCA gym way, so I looked away and twisted my towel around my waist.  I looked back; his body was turned away from mine. I watched him pull the elastic key holder around his forearm, and I did the same with mine. Our guide had left. We were quiet and awkward as we walked down an uncertain hall toward what we hoped was the hot tub.

There were men, maybe ten or fifteen, standing with towels slung around their waists in darkened corners. The screens above us were silent, but the raw sex on them seemed to follow the rhythm of the Studio 54 Spotify playlist that sounded from the speakers. I chuckled. We found the hot tub, and I stripped off my towel in the gang shower. I pointed to the sign that said, “Please shower before using the hot tub.” It was a familiar OCD. I felt like I always did when I passed the front desk at my therapist’s office, where the business card holders and laminated calendar begged to be straightened and re-straightened. I had seen the sign, and now I had to do what it said.

I pumped the soap out of the dispenser and stood under the water. A bearded, naked man walked in and descended into the hot tub without so much as glancing at the shower. I didn’t look at Steven as I rubbed the soap onto my torso, but I saw him from the corner of my eye hesitate, watch the guy pass the showers, look at me, then the sign, then reluctantly pump soap onto his palm and rub it under his arms. This, right here, might be my favorite thing about Steven: I think he’d help me straighten the business card holders and calendar at my therapist’s office if I asked him to.

We finally stepped into the water. From where I sat in the tub, I could see a still frame of a young white guy on his back, his legs spread into the receiving end of the missionary position. Steven’s view was two screens side by side showing slippery fornication on each. One featured young, hairless white guys. The other featured hairy, beefier white guys. I noticed a theme. I also noticed that deep inside, buried under a surgically composed scrotum, my original equipment was aroused. That was new.

It’s hard to explain how phalloplasty works because there are multiple possibilities for constructing a penis, but in my case, my original anatomy is rerouted and buried underneath all the reconstruction. It has all the same feelings and sensations it had before, and these are connected by nerve grafts to the new equipment. Sometimes it feels good, like a deep breath in the woods at the edge of an open field in summer. Sometimes it feels like an unpleasant and raw zap referring back to the original nerve ending—sort of like memory, a little like grief.

Steven popped out of the water and sat on the side of the hot tub. 

“I can feel my blood pressure,” he said. 

I watched him lean on his elbows and admired his body. He carried his maleness in every cell. I stayed submerged, and when the fifteen-minute timer turned off the jets, I popped up and hit the switch again.

We sat close to each other, he clothed in his trunks, and me shrouded by convulsing water, and talked in low tones under the music and Jacuzzi jets. Outside of that building, we were public figures: He, the executive director of a transgender nonprofit; I, the co-owner of an independent bookstore. Professional Public Trans ™. Right then, though, we talked about things that friends talk about when the trash of the outside world is held at bay, and the only thing that matters is the two of us, stripped down to the essentials. 

The men around us were old, young, large, small, muscular, and flabby. Their faces were soft and hopeful. Like they didn’t have to hurry. Like they didn’t have to hide. I almost felt guilty for intruding, and yet I was there in the middle of all of it, as vulnerable as I could have possibly been, and they looked at me like I’d always been there. I suppose they were as vulnerable as they could be, too. After I transitioned, I learned the ways men; straight men, in particular, guard themselves. Physical contact is kept brief – fist bumps and handshakes. Emotional contact is frequently briefer. I once gave condolences to a man for the death of his wife with a nod of the head, to which he responded, “Yeah.” 

Steven left to meet someone at the front door. He was on a mission to populate The Club with trans men, and we were so new in this place it was hard to know if the front desk guy would let any more of us in. I sat alone in the churning bath and stared at the porn. The jets relaxed me, and I didn’t notice an older man approaching. 

“Sorry?” I said.

“Is it okay if I join you?” he asked again. I knew what it meant, though my inner teenage girl kept looking for another reason a naked man would ask to sit next to me. I did the familiar inner negotiation of my boundaries. Sure, I thought, he can sit next to me. Next to me isn’t inside me. I tensed when he sat. But I knew where I was. I had chosen to be here, in some ways, for this.

“Can I touch your leg?” he asked. 

Sure, I thought. He can touch my leg. My leg isn’t my dick. He gently put his hand on my leg and started to touch himself. He didn’t, as I expected from memories of high school and the creepy guy on the church bus when I was ten, grab my hand and guide it to his dick. 

“My name’s Sam,” he said. “I have a room if you’d like to go have some fun.”

“I’m here with my friend,” I said. “He’ll be right back.”

“Oh,” he said. His hand moved to my back. He instinctively found the knotted muscles around my lower spine. On the screen, a blindfolded man was giving a blowjob. My breath got shallow. My mouth went dry. His hand lowered to my ass, and he started massaging his way into it. Sure, I thought. His fingers aren’t his dick. But I was curious about his dick. I reached over and stroked it a couple of times, carefully not looking at him but at the TV screens. His hand left my ass, and I realized he was stroking me. I knew the game was over. My body doesn’t operate the same way cis bodies operate. The loud voice in my head that had been quiet since surgery woke up screaming Fraud!

“I have some trouble with that,” I said. “You’re not going to get anything there.” I waited for him to get up and leave, to laugh, to get angry.

“That’s okay,” he said. “I understand.” He put his hand back on my leg and nudged me with his shoulder. “There are lots of other fun ways to play instead.”

I almost cried.

Steven returned alone, wrapped armpit to thigh in his towel. His swim shorts peeked out from underneath. He dropped into the water beside me, talking about how the person he went to meet didn’t show up. I turned to Sam and said, “This is my friend. I’m sorry.”

Sam smiled and said goodbye.

“You want to go walk around?” Steven asked. 

“Absolutely.”

We walked into the nearly empty hallway and made our way around the twisting corridor into the darkest corners. I followed him into another smaller room with a platform and two screens. One man in the room had strapped himself into a sling with his legs spread and was masturbating tentatively. Steven and I looked at him and then looked at each other.  We stood beside each other in the dark, listening to dance music and watching anal sex on two screens without looking at each other. Steven remained very still, not taking his eyes off the screen. I looked behind us and saw a man watching us and also watching the man in the sling. He had his hand in his towel too. In the dark, I couldn’t tell if it was the guy from the parking lot. I decided to pretend it was. I kept looking at him. 

Before I stopped using women’s restrooms, I was used to people talking and holding the door for each other. It took practice to master the art of men’s rooms. Walk in. Stall. Hurry. Sink. Hurry. Walk out. No looking or talking, especially at Lowe’s or even the YMCA. Maybe I was just like that because I was afraid to stop moving. Maybe they were too busy trying not to be seen to notice me anyway. 

But here was a place built for anonymous sex, where looking and touching was the point. It was a temporary ceasefire with rules for those desperate to be touched without consequence, and even though Steven and I hadn’t come here to hook up, I felt a crushing tenderness toward these awkward, average, strikingly beautiful middle-aged men who came to an anonymous place to stop diverting attention, to stop feeling poisonous. Just like me.

The snap of rubber jolted me out of my reverie. I wondered if it was a condom or a rubber glove. I looked at Steven and saw the look of a person who was holding his breath. Shrinking. I wanted to give him air to breathe. I wanted the sun to shine on his face, too.

Or maybe I didn’t see anything but what I would have felt a few years prior. I wish I had been a good enough friend to ask, but I didn’t. Steven gripped his towel and moved silently out of the room. I knew we were finished with our visit.

If I never know the touch of a man again, the last touch will have been gentle.

As I followed Steven silently back through the shadowy maze toward the locker room, a stranger emerged from around a corner. We passed each other there in the dark hallway in that bathhouse in a manufacturing district in St. Louis, late morning on a Tuesday in February. This anonymous man’s friend, if he was a friend, had turned away. I slowed to let him pass. He reached up and stroked the hair on my chest, a passing glance before we walked away from each other. I wanted to take his hand. I wanted to touch his face. I wanted to be gentle. I wanted not to be gentle. Every second of my life lived in that tender stroke of my chest in the dim light of the most nakedly male place in the world, where I had trespassed and had been wanted. 

I turned and followed Steven to the locker room. I knew that he was comfortable in his body, but I doubted he felt as welcome here in The Club as I had. I wondered if I was only welcomed and wanted because, in a shadowy place, I look enough like a cis man to pass for a while. I wondered if he resented me for it. I wouldn’t blame him if he did.

Behind us, a man put on his pants. I dropped my towel and turned to look at him. I looked at him for a long few seconds and let him look at me before I turned and took my time getting dressed.