Gay spas chicago

This New Year&#;s Eve at Man&#;s Country, a Chicago bathhouse open since , hundreds of men, women, transgender and nonbinary people showed out for a dance party celebrating the last hours of a queer American landmark.

Appropriately titled &#;Loose Ends,&#; the closing event was part funeral, part rebirth and all hedonistic rager. Patrons danced, cruised, drank, caressed, hallucinated, sauna&#;d and paid their respects from before midnight to well past 11 AM. It was both a throwback to the venue&#;s heyday, before the internet made many bathhouses feel obsolete, and a glimpse at what could have been had they thrown more events like this, which harmonious sleaze with sociability and made the place appealing to those beyond the aging gay generation for which it was once a mecca.

Man&#;s Country wore its history on its walls, with portraits of famous patrons, nude men, and other artwork throughout reminding visitors that this wasn&#;t some staid, humorless bathhouse. In the basement (dubbed &#;The Pit,&#;) a huge sauna—once billed as the largest in the Midwest—sat opposite a shower a