Asking Gay Men to Be Careful Isn’t Homophobia
An aspiring dramatist named Emlyn Williams watched the rain fall from his bed in his New York City apartment. He had just turned 22 and had performed in a play the night before, but—as he recalled years later in his autobiography—“the feeling of being alone darkened into loneliness.” Then a thought darted across his mind. Unlike in London, where he had spent time after graduating from Oxford, there was a place for him to go in New York City: the Everard Baths.
So he swung his feet off the bed, put on his raincoat, and “hurtled down into the drizzle over to Madison Square and up Broadway” to 28th Street, which, in 1927, was in a neighborhood of brothels, theaters, and the infamous Haymarket—the so-called Moulin Rouge of New York. Tucked in the middle of the street, the Everard Baths was a church that had been converted into a Turkish bathhouse by an Irish financier in 1888.
