A decade ago, Los Angeles boasted slick, high-tech bathhouses famous throughout the gay world. One gay man’s erotica is another’s boredom. The sex on the screen, featuring three men in hard hats, was a good deal more vigorous than what was going on in the room. Some casually watched while others, including two of the four men who were fondling each other, stared at porn films on video monitors high on the walls. About a dozen others, naked or wearing only white towels around their waists, sat around the room. The men, in their late 20s or early 30s, sat on wide stairs built into one wall of the dimly lit, high-ceilinged “erotic video lounge” at the Compound, the best-known gay bathhouse in the San Fernando Valley.
Only two of them were actually looking at each other. To the left of me, four men were having sex.
