From London, the perspective on institutions that occupy awkward social territory is instructive. The British have spent decades grappling with the legacy of laws that criminalised homosexuality, and the venues that served gay men during those years, often the only places they could meet safely, are now recognised as sites of genuine historical significance. Australia's story is not so different, and it deserves the same honest reckoning.
Glenn McNamara runs a gay sauna in Australia. He is, by most accounts, a straightforward small business operator: managing staff, maintaining facilities, dealing with local council requirements. But the venue he operates carries a weight of history that distinguishes it from almost any other kind of business. For much of the twentieth century, what happens inside a gay sauna was a criminal act in most Australian states, and the men who attended these places did so at real personal risk.
McNamara says the public image of gay saunas, shaped largely by decades of moral panic and media caricature, bears little resemblance to the reality he observes daily. The clientele is older than most people would expect, he notes. There are married men, men processing their identity in private, men who simply want community without the noise and expense of a bar. For some, particularly older gay men who came of age before decriminalisation, these spaces remain one of the few places they feel genuinely at ease.
The historical record supports a more complex reading than the stereotypes allow. When HIV/AIDS devastated gay communities across Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, saunas became frontline sites for sexual health education and outreach. Organisations like the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations worked directly with venue operators to distribute information and condoms at a time when the federal government's response was, at best, delayed. The venues, precisely because they were stigmatised, were also intimate: safer sex messaging reached people there who might never have walked into a clinic.
This is the part that tends to get lost in polite conversation about the LGBTQI+ community. The sanitised, rainbow-branded version of queer life that now appears in corporate Pride campaigns sits comfortably in the mainstream. The parts of queer life that remain sexually explicit, that resist domestication, attract far less sympathy, even from within progressive circles. There is a legitimate argument, made by historians and community advocates alike, that this selective acceptance amounts to a kind of respectability politics that leaves the most vulnerable behind.
The centre-right instinct here is sound in one respect: the state has no business in the private consensual lives of adults, and the decriminalisation of homosexuality across Australian states between the 1970s and 1990s was a straightforward victory for individual liberty. The Australian Human Rights Commission has documented the lasting harm caused by criminalisation, harm that extended well beyond the law itself into employment, family life, and mental health.
Where the conversation becomes more layered is around the ongoing regulatory treatment of these venues. Local councils in several states apply licensing and zoning conditions to gay saunas that critics argue are more restrictive than those applied to comparable heterosexual venues. Whether that reflects legitimate public health considerations or residual institutional bias is a question that deserves scrutiny rather than assumption. The Fair Work Commission and various state health authorities have, over the years, engaged with operators on occupational health standards, a sign that the regulatory relationship is maturing, even if inconsistently.
McNamara's account also touches on something that public health researchers have observed for some time: the role these venues play in reaching gay and bisexual men who do not identify openly. For men who are not out, who live in regional areas, or who are from cultural backgrounds where homosexuality remains heavily stigmatised, a sauna may be the only setting where they access any information about sexual health at all. The Kirby Institute at UNSW Sydney, which leads much of Australia's research into HIV and sexual health, has long recognised this, and its community engagement work reflects it.
None of this is to suggest that gay saunas are beyond criticism or that every aspect of how they operate should be immune from scrutiny. Reasonable people can hold different views about the place of explicitly sexual commercial venues in a community, and those views do not have to be rooted in homophobia to deserve a hearing. What is harder to justify is the persistent refusal to engage with these venues seriously, as businesses, as health outreach sites, and as places with genuine historical meaning to people whose lives were shaped by laws that most Australians now regard as a source of national embarrassment.
The story McNamara tells is not sensational. It is, in its way, quietly ordinary: a business owner who knows his regulars, who keeps the lights on, and who understands that what he provides matters to people in ways that are not always visible from the outside. That ordinariness is itself a kind of progress.