Public bath

Finally, I managed to overcome my complexes, and I began to go to a public bath in our suburb. It began in the late 1960s and continued until Perestroika and even several years after it. Actually, it was not a general department, but a large hall of showers without partitions, five rows. And a steam room. A visit to the bath was a pleasant event for me, I looked forward to it. I went there twice a week, in the evening, on weekdays, when the contingent was more or less young. Students of technical schools or of a local institute, cadets of military schools, soldiers (they were brought before closing time, and you could be in their midst). I came across men from the Caucasus and gypsies who always went the same bathhouse. Gypsies have big dicks, this is a known fact, I found this out in our bathhouse.

Subsequently, when I went to the West, where there are no public baths, I realized that nowhere else could I see so many different guys and men up close and from a variety of angles and perspectives. Actually, my idea of the anatomy of male body was formed during many years of visiting our bathhouse.

It was a suburb, and there was not much debauchery in the bathhouse. A few local gays, young and old, occasionally came in from the Big City. They ran along the rows of showers, looked out for someone to stand up against in the next shower of the row, jerked off their dick. Sometimes, in the evening, towards closing time, there was a real running around the rows. By the way, the rest of the people saw this activity, and no one was ever indignant, no one said a word. And this once again proves that people had tolerance for this phenomenon. Intolerance and aggressiveness arise when they are instigated by higher authorities.

Of course, in the Big City there were notorious bathhouses where all the queens and gays gathered. Right there, in different nooks and crannies, in the bath toilets, they fucked and sucked dicks. But I haven't heard of any scandals either. The Soviet government did not particularly pay attention to this aspect of life.

Over the many years of going to our bathhouse in the Suburb, I had only one stable acquaintance - a relationship that lasted a couple of years. But the main thing was the contemplation of a large number of male bodies. In the bath, I merged with the general mass of people, and this was also a pleasant feeling.

Fear of the public bath

  

So I was overcome by the desire to see a naked man somewhere. I walked near the beaches, waiting for the moment when they change clothes in the bushes. But it would seem that the easiest thing was to go to a public bath! And - no, I couldn’t, I was embarrassed to undress among the crowd of people, I can’t even say why I was embarrassed. Apparently, it was some kind of an insurmountable psychological barrier.

In our Suburb there were two baths, I went there  but only in shower cabins separated from one another by thick stone walls. I kept planning for myself the day when I would finally go to a public bath, but I put it off for many years. In enclosed showers, of course, it was dreary. Someone was washing behind the wall, spitting, smoking. Sometimes two men bathed, their loud conversations could be heard. At the bottom there was a drain, one for two cabins, a rather large hole, and, bending down, one could look into the neighboring cabin and sometimes see something. Once I bent low to the floor and saw a spectacle that shocked me: a young man was fucking a radiator!

There were also bathrooms, where the ticket cost more. Once, having taken a ticket to the bathroom, I went there, pulled the door handle, it was unlocked, and there, in the bath, lay a man, a court of hanging clothes, a serviceman judging by the clothes on the hanger. He said: “do come here, come, what's wrong with that! Women wash with each other, so you and I will wash". I was confused, didn't know how to react to this, and quickly stepped back, slamming the door. Afterwards I regretted for a long time that I did not dare to go in and wash with him in the same bathroom. I pictured in my mind what could have happened in this case ...

It also happened that in the evenings I stood outside to the unevenly plastered windows of the men’s section of the public bath and tried to look at the naked men through the gaps. My presence near the windows of the men's bath did not raise questions from anyone, because it was a men's bath. At the same time many were lurking on the other side, where there were windows of the women's bath. They were chased from there and shamed.