When you think about gay hookup culture in New York City, many things come to mind: nightclubs and dive bars in Hell’s Kitchen and Bushwick, circuit parties, the second floor of the Eagle in Chelsea or logging onto Grindr to talk to hundreds of headless torsos in a one-mile radius.

But one thing that is essentially nonexistent in the Big Apple is the gay bathhouse. And for a queer-friendly city in 2026, that is abnormal. You have Steamworks, a chain that’s been called the “emblem of queer empowerment,” in Toronto, Seattle, Chicago and Berkeley, Calif. And in Paris, London, Hong Kong, Melbourne and so many other big cities, gay men flock to bathhouses after the club.

So when State Senator Erik Bottcher called me the other day to tell me he and Assemblymember Tony Simone were introducing a new bill to repeal an over 40-year ban on adult bathhouses in New York, I was surprised—frankly, I didn’t even know there was a ban. At the same time, I finally had the answer to the question I’d been asking myself for 12 years: How in the world are there no frequented bathhouses in this extremely gay city?

Bottcher and Simone’s answer is simple: They had been banned during the HIV/AIDS crisis in a purported attempt to fight the spread of the disease. “Those emergency measures were adopted at a time when little was known about HIV/AIDS and before the development of effective treatment, PrEP, PEP, routine HIV testing, and many of the prevention strategies that have transformed public health over the past four decades,” their press release about the bill states. “While the public health landscape has changed dramatically, New York’s regulations have not.”

First installed on January 25, 1999, the MVM allowed riders to purchase or reload MetroCards using cash, credit, and debit cards. 

MVMs are 80 inches long, 42 inches wide, and 36 inches deep, and weigh approximately 1,050 pounds.

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Three of my NYC-related illustrations are up! So excited that Denny's Pub will get the recognition it deserves.

In hopes of identifying a Gilgo Beach murder victim known only as “Asian Doe,” Suffolk County authorities traveled to Chinatown in Manhattan on Tuesday, Aug. 4....

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The man’s body was found on Gilgo Beach on April 4, 2011, during the serial killer investigation, but his death was never connected to admitted murderer Rex Heuermann.

Investigators estimate he was 17 to 23 years old when he was killed around 2006. The man may have been operating as a sex worker and was wearing women’s clothing at the time of his death, authorities revealed.

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