The closet was not built to withstand history.
For over twenty-four hundred years, public bathhouses have been a place for male intimacy — an unbroken line from the Greco-Roman world to a bathhouse in Dallas today. Different centuries, different cities, different men. The same walls, in a sense, serving the same purpose.
The one real interruption came in the 1980s, when the AIDS crisis closed bathhouses across the country almost overnight. Even that pause couldn’t hold. The line picked back up, because it was never really about the buildings.
This diptych sets the two ends of that line side by side — the same figures, the same closeness, a few thousand years apart.
— Behan
