Tag Archives: Man’s Country

#FlashbackFriday – Man’s Country Bathhouse NYC Cable TV Commercial (1970’s) – Video

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Man’s Country was a wildly popular bathhouse chain that had branches in New York City and Chicago in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Man’s Country in NYC was located on a residential street in a former office building.

The most interesting thing about Man’s Country was that he main orgy room featured a full sized tractor trailer cab for use to fulfill your trucker fantasies and  have sex on/under/inside, you name it. It was also famous for it’s $1.00 Tuesday night rates, that attracted mammoth numbers of men.

While popular Man’s Country never reached the same popularity level as the downtown St. Marks Baths or the uptown Everard Baths it was well visited to say the least.

Man’s Country NYC closed at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in 1983.

UPDATE 11/26/16:   Man ‘s Country Chicago owner Chuck Renslow announced to his employees that he will be selling the building, which has been around since 1907 and was originally built as a lodge hall.

The Windy City Times article includes a lot of history over the 43 years that Man’s Country has existed. Check it out here.

One paragraph in particular serves as a wonderful summation:

Renslow is rightfully proud to say that for a long while Man’s Country was the finest bathhouse in the country. After 43 years, the eventual closing of these doors will also be the end of an era. For generations Man’s Country stood as a symbol for the evolution of gay liberation and consciousness. Though its original grandeur has tarnished, the value and necessity of this building and it’s place in the evolution of Chicago LGBT history cannot be minimized.

The true end of an era.

Who Will Buy? – One of the Few Remaining Gay Sex Spaces Seattle’s Bathouse Club Z for Sale

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One of the few remaining gay bathouses in America, Seattle Washington’s Club Z in the Capitol Hill section is up for sale.

Here is the realtor’s description for the $2.15 million listing for 1117 Pike:

Built in 1906 this three story commercial building is for sale for the first time in almost 40 years. The Pike Building is located just above downtown Seattle in an A+ Capitol Hill location. This offers a Buyer the rare opportunity to purchase a pride-of-ownership property located only 3 blocks from downtown Seattle.

“The property offers endless potential for an investor to redevelop the property or maintain the existing use,” the marketing copy concludes.

The building has been home to a gay bathhouse for decades. Today known as Club Z, (originally called the  “Zodiac Social Club”) the sex club is one of the few left in the country.

The Stranger’s Christopher Frizzelle wrote a rather sex-negative history of the Club Z building’s place in Seattle — a mix of early 20th century hotels, World War II internment, AIDS, drugs, and sex — as the property was being planned for demolition and development in the early 2000s. A project to create a multi-story condominium development began the permitting process but never made it past planning phases. The property continues to be held by the same real estate investor who purchased it in the 1970s.

In January Chicago’s landmark gay bathhouse Man’s Country closed after 44 years in business.

Shall we start a $2.15 million dollar GoFundMe campaign to buy it and save our historic gay sex spaces?

Gay Website PUMA Claims Obama And Rahm Emanuel Visited Chicago Bathhouse Man’s Country

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Man’s Country

(Just so you know PUMA, stands for Party Unity My Ass, the derisive expression created by those who refused to accept that Hillary Clinton did not win the 2008 Democratic nomination.)

HillBuzz, the Hillary Clinton PUMA site founded by Kevin DuJan, has got the wingnut blogosphere all a dither over a claim that some mysterious MSM journalist is at last investigating the claim that the president and Rahm Emanuel were once regular patrons of the Chicago-area bathhouse, Man’s Country.

This has to be cloak-and-dagger for the time being, because though we’ve not been sworn to secrecy on the project, we’re not at liberty to talk in depth about what we did yesterday, which was in response to one of the occasional requests we get from members of the media for background info on stories they’re doing. Normally, it’s foreign journalists who get in touch with us when they’re in Chicago and want to go to the Southside to see how terrible it is, and talk about how Obama did absolutely jack squat for it as either a state senator or US Senator, and hasn’t used any of his particular brand of unicorn horn magic to improve it (or the black community residing there) since the illustrious Golden Age of Hope and Change began on January 20th, 2009. But, this time it was a US reporter who wanted information on Man’s Country in Andersonville, which is a place both Obama and Rahm Emanuel frequented in the past. Obama until 2002 or so, and Emanuel through 2008, according to what we’ve been told. We spent a good amount of time on the ground in Uptown, Boystown, Andersonville, and Hyde Park yesterday with this reporter, also telling him everything we knew about Trinity United Church of Christ and the Down-Low Club it operated under Jeremiah Wright’s supervision/matchmaking.

Now see I could see Rahm doing that. It would go a long way to explain his homophobia and he is arrogant enough to go to a bathhouse without worrying about getting caught.  I see Obama more at the world famous Bijou Cinema and I think Rahm would be more of a North Avenue baths kind of guy, with those hairy, old eastern european guys – and some politicos, like the Jacksons thrown in to boot.  LOL

Ah PUMA, they make the birthers seem almost legitimate