A Day and a Night at the Baths by Michael Rumaker

The dates are important to mention in order to put the open sensuality in the novel in
perspective., that is, pre-AIDS, when male-male sexuality was being liberated from its
centuries-long subterranean hiddenness into a visibility if only, in this instance, of the
twilit and claustrophobic “freedom” of a bath house.  (M.R. from the intro)


The baths will never be a footnote to our history but rather an integral part of it and what is interesting
is that many men who would never set foot in a gay bar would visit the bathhouses. Communication
for the most part was non verbal and sex ruled. This was our past and long before the internet and email,
for many this is how and where we met.   Amos Lassen

Rumaker an original prose creator of great shamed heroic sensitivity has taken up his pen
again to describe a hidden psychological & physical reality. As an old sex fiend from the
baths myself I’m grateful & relieved to see thru his eyes and feel thru his body.      Allen Ginsberg

Rumaker gives us something much more than a well-crafted elaboration on a special moment in time.
He looks beyond the twelve hours his character spends at the baths. He imagines man’s lusty tribal
past reawakened into being by a messy mass orgy and offers some possible futures for eros in a culture
that seems determined to harness it for any purpose other than pleasure and rob it of its vitality. A Day
and a Night in the Baths is smart, curious, unsentimental, and yet quite endearing. This reprinted edition
is a welcome reminder that even in the era of AIDS, where caution and precaution are advisable,
being especially promiscuous can be liberating, instructive, beautiful, invigorating, thrilling, and
need not be tagged as addictive, compulsive behavior.        Rob Stephenson, author of Passes Through

Michael Rumaker


Michael Rumaker is an American author (born March 5, 1932 in Philadelphia, PA),
to Michael Joseph and Winifred Marvel Rumaker. He is a graduate of Black Mountain
College (1955) and Columbia University (1970). Most of Rumaker's fiction concerns his
life as a gay man. His first book, The Butterfly, is a fictionalized memoir of his brief affair
with a young Yoko Ono, published before Ono became famous. His short stories, Gringos
and other stories, appeared in 1967. A revised and expanded version appeared in 1991.
He began to write directly about his life as a gay man in the volumes A Day and a Night
at the Baths (1979) and My First Satyrnalia (1981). The novel Pagan Days (1991) is told
from the perspective of an eight-year old boy struggling to understand his gay self. Black Mountain
Days, a memoir of his time at Black Mountain College, has a strong autobiographical element
In addition, there are portraits of many students, faculty, and visitors (especially the poets Robert
Creeley and Charles Olson) during its last years, 1952-1956.