Although smartphones with hook-up apps are a convenient way to cruise, nothing can replace these gay institutions where you can live out your erotic fantasies with guaranteed action and without judgment (or endless swiping). Today, gay bathhouses or gay saunas can be found in cities around the world. It wasn’t until the late 19th-century that bathhouses came to the US as just a place to bathe, but that soon changed by the mid-20th century when they were frequented by closeted gay men with the American gay bathhouse scene reaching its peak in the early 1970s. Bathhouses date back to the Roman Empire and since same-sex activity wasn’t that taboo during Pagan times, you can’t help but think that things happened.