In many cultures, bathing in communal bathhouses has been an important social and even religious ritual. In Japan it is the sento, among Yiddish-speaking Jews, the shvitz, and in the Arab world the hammam, all of them centers for socializing across class lines, providing relief from culturally imposed modesty, and a place to get luxuriously clean. By the early 1900s, New York City had built and maintained a network of public bathhouses—many of them resembling Roman temples—in immigrant neighborhoods. Because they are traditionally segregated by gender, bathhouses have also long been associated with same-sex eroticism. It is in this capacity that they have gained most of their notoriety in American culture. Though the increasing availability of indoor plumbing in private houses decreased the need for public baths, the bathhouse remained a mainstay of American gay male culture until the advent of the AIDS epidemic in the...