Backroom

From Homolexis Glossary

Common features of gay bars and clubs in the 1960s and 1970s, backrooms can still occasionally be found. Typically, a backroom in a gay bar is a small dark or dimly lit room at the back of the club where customers can go to have sex, usually without undressing. In their heyday, the sex that took place in backrooms was usually unprotected and anonymous. The advent of HIVAIDS, and increasing awareness of risk spelled the closing of many backrooms in gay bars.

Darkrooms remain a feature of some sex clubs and bathhouses, where they may be advertised as an amenity or attraction. (The AIDS crisis, however, led to the closing of many bathhouses.) In a sex club a darkroom may be as simple as a small darkened area large enough for two or three people. Conversely, it may comprise a large portion of the club's floor area, with mazelike corridors, glory holes, private nooks, steel grilles resembling the enclosures of prison cells, and varying floor levels.

Today, with many locating sexual partners on the Internet, backrooms and darkrooms—together with gay bars and bathhouses themselves—attract a diminishing clientele. Many prefer to bypass them altogether.