Reviews for A day and a night at the baths

The average rating for A day and a night at the baths based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-05-14 00:00:00 Leon A. Groenenberg Michael Rumaker's "A Day and a Night at the Baths" (The Baths) is an evocative narrative of a gay man's first trip to the Everard Baths, a realm of, "grime and sweat and steam and chlorine," on a cold winter day in the 1970s. The sweeping, poetic prose Rumaker employs throughout the piece echoes the courageous language of the then-nascent Gay Liberation movement. After all, this was the 1970s, when there were so few "unrestricted havens, no ports free of the contaminating fathers" for gay men to meet, get to know one another, and have carefree sex. "The heart's desire and the awakener of the heart; the miracle of a barely imagined paradise, here in this dingy smelly place, heavy with stale body odors and decades-old perspiration of lust-sweat, and fear-sweat, and ashes of spermfire that encrust the walls and floors and ceilings from all the century-long years of those who have searched here in unspeakable pleasure and pain." Throughout The Baths, the narrator sought to chuck off almost all consigns of the vapid sense of socially-accepted beauty to embrace the uniqueness of our physiques. In the sauna, "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." The book describes encounters with all different types of men, young, old, white, dark, beefy, thin ' and those with a disability even ' "even one struggling about the halls on aluminum crutches, his twisted legs strapped in metal braces" and discovers beauty, hope, and a sense of resilience in each and every framework of lives he encountered. "There is no end to desire." The version of The Baths I read included an Afterward penned by the author that was especially poignant to me. As someone born during the very winter of The Baths, I never knew the gay movement sans the cloak of AIDS. Too young to comprehend the horror of witnessing friend after friend die of an unknown illness, my family, friends, and community made sure that I believed, no, prayed, that the evil gays got whatever plague god consigned to to them. "The queer spirit had a vital if hidden existence, surviving centuries of state and religious persecutions that sought to hobble and murder it'and that still do to this day." By writing this review, I only hope to impart the notion that books like The Baths are important and need to be shared and talked about. Without such valiant testaments of "antiseptic and root-sap, forced out of sunshine, out of moonshine," I fear wouldn't be able to live the life I so happily lead today.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-04-03 00:00:00 Roberto Jacobo This is nearly pornography only perhaps through the author's command of language does it become obvious after you read a passage several times that no, it's not quite pornographic, it's much closer to literature. And while certainly it may be possible for some people to use it as an assistance in a masturbatory act, I would suggest that there are magazines or even tv shows better suited for such desires. This book really is not intended for a younger audience, and I would object to providing it to a young person. That said, I probably would have been very interested in the book as a teenager. The language is rather flowery which I think is actually a positive feature. In fact this 70s era moment in time has actually made me slightly sad at how poorly people write in contemporary literature. What can you do? Read more books I suppose. THIS IS A VERY VERY GAY TEXT. WILL PROBABLY OFFEND YOU IF YOU GET OFFENDED BY REPEATED COPULATIONS OF A HOMOSEXUAL NATURE. But seeing as how it's not pornography, sometimes the copulations are skipped over or implied. You know, like in The Great Gatsby. Thanks Lance...I still to this day don't know how I skipped over that part.