Anne first began visiting Hawks PDX, one of the only queer bathhouses in Portland, for years, dating back to when it was located on Grand Avenue downtown. Back then, they said, they were an outlier at the club.
“When I was going there before, it was predominantly gay men—and once in a while you would see a single female or a male-female couple, and even more rarely see a transgender person,” Anne, who asked that the Mercury use a pseudonym for their name, said.
That a bathhouse would be dominated by gay men was not unusual. Bathhouses in the U.S. have catered primarily to gay men for nearly a century, providing space for their clientele to safely relax and recreate when such spaces were few and far in between.
“At a time when gay men couldn’t openly be themselves, bathhouses opened a space for them to express their identity and their sexuality openly, without judgement,” Jason Doucheff, Hawks’ head of corporate operations and community liaison, said. “And also to be a place of congregation for other people who were doing the same thing.”
San Francisco, for example, was home to more than 30 bathhouses in the 1970s. By 1987, with the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic fueling a severe backlash against bathhouses and other institutions of queer public sex like adult theaters, not a single bathhouse in the city remained open.
Portland never had as many bathhouses as San Francisco, but the half-dozen or so bathhouses that did operate in the city were nevertheless an important part of its queer life.
But as in San Francisco, Portland’s gay bathhouses began to disappear with the onset of the AIDS crisis. Club Portland, the city’s most famous bathhouse, shuttered in 2007 and has since been transformed into the McMenimans Crystal Hotel.
Since the heyday of the bathhouse, things have changed on multiple fronts: cities like Portland have become significantly more hospitable to queer people, while dating and hookup culture has increasingly migrated from physical to virtual space.
In Portland, just a pair of bathhouses have survived: Steam Portland, a male-only bathhouse in Kerns, and Hawks—the city’s only gender-inclusive bathhouse, which moved to its current location in Hazelwood just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, however, Hawks is in the midst of a process of reinvention. The club still has elements of the traditional bathhouse experience, dedicating various nights to members of the gay male community, but they’re increasingly looking beyond that community to reach people for whom bathhouses have not historically been designed.
Hawks has introduced a bisexual night and a trans social. The first Sapphic Takeover event, held in late May, drew a line down the block.
“It’s been a real evolution,” Anne said. “I don’t know much about any other bathhouses in the country that are doing what they’re doing, and on the level of what they’re doing, because they’re being so inclusive about different groups.”
Hawks is trying to fill a variety of other roles, as well: the bathhouse has partnered with the Multnomah County Health Department and the Cascade AIDS Project to offer vaccination and STI testing clinics, and has set up a food bank as well.
Increasingly, Doucheff said, Hawks is becoming a kind of community hub. People have hosted their birthday parties in the space, signed up for yoga classes, and attended lingerie swaps. The club serves food and has two patios, one of which allows smoking. In late May, Hawks hosted a slumber party and offered a continental breakfast in the morning.
“Queer people are looking for a place that’s an anchor point where they can be with other queer people, to be themselves, to explore—even people who don’t necessarily identify as queer, can be in a safe spot,” Doucheff said.
Astrid, a community member who met her partner on her first trip to Hawks three years ago, said the club is meeting a particular kind of need at a perilous political moment, when members of the LGBTQ+ community have been under attack from the federal government.
“It has become its own kind of community space,” they said. “Yes, it is a space where there’s sex things happening and people are naked, but I see a lot more people just hanging out and talking, making connections and friendships, and building relationships. And I think that’s really important—community is always important, but especially at times like this.”
As Hawks has broadened the scope of its programming to more parts of the queer community, the vibe of the space has begun to change as well.
“They’ve been really trying to support the fact that it’s a queer-focused space,” Astrid said, noting that the clientele now includes fewer people interested in a more traditional sex club environment. “I think that makes people feel safer.”
There are several other factors that have helped broaden Hawks’ appeal. The club is alcohol-free, Anne said, making it an alternative to queer bars.
The new interest in Hawks has been good for business, too: Doucheff said Hawks has hired five new employees in the last two months. Moving forward, Doucheff said, the goal is to ensure that Hawks is as welcoming as possible for all members of the queer community in Portland.
“In the current political climate, people don’t feel safe,” Doucheff said. “They don’t feel accepted. They’re having services and resources ripped away from them. So we’re trying to alleviate that.”
Hawks PDX, 335 SE 99th, hawkspdx.com, @hawkspdx
