new york magazine sent troye sivan and elliot page to a 194-degree bathhouse for its first men's issue. we'll be in the steam room.
Photo: Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
via New York magazine, Queerty and The Advocate
The Russian & Turkish Baths on East 10th Street is kept at 194 degrees Fahrenheit and serves, per New York magazine, "sweat, shrimp, and borscht." Its history, the magazine says, runs through "the émigré years, the second-generation years, the gay years, the Mafia years, the flophouse years." On Monday it added the thirst-trap years.
The magazine's first stand-alone Men's Style issue went live on Sept. 28 as "The Boys in the Baths," a portfolio shot by Ryan McGinley. Around Labor Day, it invited a mix of Baths regulars and first-timers "to wear some fashion. But hardly any." The cast: Troye Sivan, "who'd just moved to the city," Elliot Page, Brandon Flynn, Jeremy O. Harris, Marlon James, Mike Faist, Christopher Abbott, Sam Nivola, Isaac Cole Powell, Francesco Clemente and more, in shorts, towels and a Prada earring or two. Queerty called it "a Labor Day hang." We call it the most expensive group chat photo ever taken.
what they said in the steam
Everyone got a caption, and the captions are the good part. Flynn, a regular, lives close by and goes on Sundays. "It kind of feels parallel to a church experience. It's like naked church." Congregation of one, reporting for service.
Page, in Saint Laurent shorts, said he went to a bathhouse recently, and that it was new territory: "I've only in the past couple of years been like, Yeah, that sounds nice, to like go somewhere and sit around in your body like that." He also belts Cher's "Believe" in the shower and, somehow, "The Sound of Music," a movie he says he has never seen. (We covered the last time a man had opinions about Page's body, when Sean Strickland got involved. This is a nicer week.)
Sivan, whose next album Queerty says is due Oct. 9, said it is "not coming from a place of peace. I think it's coming from a place of longing. There's a lot of manifestation on the album, where I write these love songs to this guy I don't know." Sir, you were in a bathhouse. (His last run of news, for the record, was getting Ian McKellen to narrate a disco video.) One caption also spells his name "Troy," which The Advocate clocked before we could.
jeremy o. harris has notes
The best quote belongs to the playwright, who used his caption to file a complaint about steam-room etiquette: "Young men who are obviously sort of like on a no-homo tip, very much in finance, wearing full socks and shoes in the steam room with their gym shorts." He would also like people to take their headphones off and "actually take in the sounds." We have never agreed with anything more.
Not everyone was delighted. The replies under the magazine's launch post on X filled up with people objecting to Page being in a men's issue at all, which is roughly what happens every time Page is in anything. The post itself cleared 11,000 likes anyway.
