The private rooms at Mac's Bathhouse in Silver Lake are a hot ticket on Saturday nights. Well-dressed men with gym bags start arriving at the labyrinth-like club before sunset, and by early evening a "No Vacancy" sign dangles beneath a stern AIDS warning posted on the cashier's window, signaling that the 50 personal cubicles are taken.
Those who come later are forced to accept semi-private accommodations. As they trade their street clothes for towels and settle into bunk beds, steam rooms and each other's arms, a gay pornographic movie plays silently on a television and an empty Jacuzzi burbles near the rounded walkway known as the tunnel of love.
Soft voices echo along the dimly lit gray and black corridors where the private rooms are located, and the faint aroma of marijuana wafts from one area. In other cubicles the doors are left open to reveal nude men, alone, paired off or in groups.
Someone May Grab
"Try to walk down the middle of the hallways," says Doug Myers, owner of the club that is known as the Cadillac of bathhouses. "Otherwise someone might grab you."
The fact that some men are still grabbing each other at the baths--despite the gruesome specter of AIDS--is clear to anyone who has visited Mac's or the Compound or the Melrose Baths. Not so clear is what the future holds for these clubs, which have been abandoned by both gay leaders and a large percentage of their former patrons.
The clubs still in business sometimes are busy, but there are fewer of them. Of 25 or more operating in Los Angeles County before the AIDS outbreak, 12 are still licensed.
After years of hand-wringing and debate, the county Board of Supervisors today is expected to adopt new health regulations that could pull the stopper on the surviving bathhouses. The supervisors' own AIDS Commission, refueling old arguments, recommended closure two weeks ago on grounds that the baths encourage unsafe sex.
But the club's owners, who maintain they have have cleaned up their act, have pledged to do whatever it takes to keep themselves in business.
Myers and other owners have adopted the siege mentality of people who find themselves battling long odds. Some have emerged from the shadows of the gay underground to deliver the message that their clubs, which have been vilified by many people, are partners in the fight to stem the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
