The Banya on Piyonerskaya, Part ISo, Kirill, who I had met in the park, met me at the Cosmonaut Metro station on Saturday at 2pm as planned, to show me the banya on Pioneer Street, which was renamed Mukumi Street. The banya is across from the “bird store.” It no longer exists. At the time I left Tashkent, it was being demolished. When I visited a few years later, it was replaced with a posh café with fake, plastic palm trees decorated with Christmas lights out front. Inside, I saw a floorshow with young children performing very sexually inappropriate ballroom dancing.
But back, when it was for all ostensible purposes, the gay meeting place, when I first stepped in the place, it was probably one of the filthiest places I’d ever imagine to be a bathhouse. There were lots of filthy places in Tashkent that I’d seen – filthy toilets, filthy restaurants, filthy houses, filthy offices, but this place took the cake.
First, the building looked as though it was going to collapse. You entered and paid 200 soums (something like 30 cents) to an ancient man who sat behind a window. You walked up stairs to a drab changing room, with lockers that didn’t have locks, but pieces of string that Shukhrat the attendant tied through the holes for you. Shukhrat was 32, but looked much younger. I complimented him and he told me that his secret to staying young was the sperm of young boys. So, this was Uzbek camp humor.
The floors were grimy, the benches splintery, the wall had a poster of Yulduz Usmanova covering decrepit plaster with chunks falling out. The men too, a few of them there, looked old and broken and drab, like the rest of the room. They were ordinary Uzbek men, the kind you see everywhere on the street, nothing distinctive about them. Not particularly flamboyant. All wearing wedding bands – they were married, as, seemingly all men in the country, gay or straight. I suppose with mostly arranged marriages, everyone is left to find what they really want on the side.
I suppose this was it. I had arrived. I found gay life in Tashkent.