If the government takes your house to make way for a highway bypass that will improve traffic flow, you’re entitled to (and may even get) fair compensation for that taking of your property.

But not all government takings are followed by recompense, nor are they even acknowledged as a taking. In the 1980s, for instance, municipal authorities in New York City closed gay bathhouses as a response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. They argued that the bathhouses were hot spots for transmission of the disease.

Whether or not the closures were defensible from a public health standpoint, fair compensation never entered the equation. Instead, the closures not only deprived bathhouse owners of their business income, but also deprived clients of a sociocultural milieu that was important and irreplaceable.

Timothy Lyle, assistant professor of English at Iona College (at left), and Stephen Engel, associate professor of politics at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, present research arguing that the 1980s closure of New York City’s gay bathhouses was an act of “dignity takingâ€� from the gay community. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

In short, as professors Stephen Engel of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Timothy Lyle of Iona College argued during a March 2 talk at the college, the bathhouse shutdowns constituted a “dignity takingâ€�: a confiscation of property, made without just compensation or legitimate public purpose, whose goal is to infantilize or dehumanize the affected group. (It’s a concept originated by Bernadette Atuahene, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law.)

Engel and Lyle presented their recent research as part of an interpretive series accompanying the college production of Angels in America: Millennium Approaches. The lunchtime session in a Commons meeting room drew an enthusiastic capacity crowd, perhaps drawn in part by the talk’s title, which for the first time in this context at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dropped an F-bomb: “F***ing with Dignity: Public Sex, Queer Intimate Kinship, and How the AIDS Epidemic Bathhouse Closures Constituted a Dignity Taking.”

In June, the Chicago-Kent Law Review will publish the research by Lyle, a former visiting professor at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ who is now an assistant professor of English at Iona, and Engel, a professor of politics who studies U.S. political and legal development and social movements, particularly involving LGBTQ issues.

What did the bathhouses mean to New York’s gay community in the mid-1980s? If many baths weren’t created “for the purpose of men to seek out sexual encounters with each other,â€� Engel explained, “by the turn of the 20th century, some became known as ‘favorite spots’ where same-sexual relations were not discouraged.

On Jan. 6, 1986, New Yorkers pass by the shuttered St. Mark’s Baths in Greenwich Village. The institution was one of many gay bathhouses that the city closed in the 1980s as a response to the HIV/AIDS crisis. The order to close is posted on the front door. (AP photo/Rene Perez. Used with permission)

“They provided space for men to socialize with one another as identifiably gay men,� Engel continued. “The gay bathhouse took on an even more symbolic value within the context of the 1970s when queer sex acts were articulated as a kind of liberation from heteronormative constraints.�

In a way, the bathhouses served as community centers, offering films and live entertainment, hosting benefits, and offering voter registration and screenings for sexually transmitted infections. (Bette Midler, it was noted, still regards her early-career performances at the Continental Baths as some of her favorite gigs.)

“Unfortunately, public officials’ first response to the crisis was to invade these community institutions as sites of the problem.”

“In short, the baths were sites of community and kinship formation that helped gay men to interact beyond the carnal.�

Yet that role was never considered by the authorities, said Lyle, nor were “queer understandings of space, contact, intimacy, and belonging that animated these spaces.�

“So to entertain any notion that these closures damaged the dignity of gay men, we must resist the urge to pathologize these public, anonymous, and casual sex institutions,â€� Lyle said. “But unfortunately, public officials’ first response to the crisis was to invade these community institutions as sites of the problem at the very time that [government was] underspending on HIV education, prevention, and resources for these communities under siege.â€�

The closures and the public debate surrounding them “violated the dignity of gay men in a few different ways,â€� Lyle said. The furor exacerbated a tendency to blame gay men for the epidemic. It overshadowed the gay community’s own substantial efforts to regulate the baths.

The March 2 presentation “F***ing With Dignity” drew a capacity crowd to a conference room in Commons. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Finally, public perception reinforced the authorities’ refusal “to engage in the queer logics that articulated the communal value of these spaces,� Lyle said. “Simply put, these bathhouses challenged the supposedly neat and tidy boundaries that separate the public from the private.�

The gay community’s own push to regulate bathhouse behaviors was a measure of the community’s determination and cohesiveness. Working with bath owners, organizations such as the Coalition for Sexual Responsibility and Gay Men’s Health Crisis undertook substantial campaigns to promote safer sex and to make recommendations, to be backed by inspections, for educational, hygienic, and structural improvements in the bathhouses.

Basing their presentation on archival research conducted in New York City in 2016, Engel and Lyle offered colorful examples of promotional materials from the campaign to self-regulate. Engel described a proposed poster design, listing high-risk practices to avoid, that proclaimed in bold type, “Sex is wonderful!� — and then warned, “But don’t let it kill you.�

Another poster reminded readers, “Affection is our best protection.�

The gay community’s effort to support the bathhouses, designed to balance health (and political) imperatives with sex-positivity and community solidarity, was aligned with some official resistance to closing the baths, in part on the grounds that closures would constitute excessive government interference.

New York City Commissioner of Health David Sencer was an opponent of closure, as were members of a state bathhouse subcommittee. But in adopting the CSR recommendations for bathhouse practices, the subcommittee also, in Engel’s words, “essentially co-opted the community’s efforts of self-regulation and stated them as their own.â€�

“Sex is wonderful! But don’t let it kill you.�

In October 1985, the state public health council amended the sanitary code such that “no establishment shall make facilities available for the purpose of sexual activities where anal intercourse, vaginal intercourse, or fellatio take place. Such facilities will constitute a threat to the public health.�

The council didn’t acknowledge, Engel explained, “that these institutions could be anything other than a threat to the public and that activities within them could be anything other than those that spread contagion.

“Furthermore, the provision made no distinction between high- and low-risk activities, and ignored the recommendations of the state’s bathhouse subcommittee, the community-based organizations, and contemporary medical science.�

The New York Daily News of Nov. 10, 1985, covered the city’s edict against establishments permitting “dangerous sex.”

Ultimately, the city shut down most of the baths. “Elected officials painted gay men as oversexed animals incapable of responding to the crisis,” Lyle argued.

“The bathhouse closures perpetuated [a narrative of gay] culpability, ignited pretty serious divisions within the gay and lesbian communities, and produced within gay men, I think, a deep distrust and even fear of government — and one another, to be honest.�

The other side of the dignity-taking coin, of course, is dignity restoration. And while the rhetoric around U.S. Supreme Court decisions striking down sodomy laws and upholding LGBT marriage might feel restorative and uplifting, Engel argued that their conceptual underpinnings, in fact, are “quite narrow.�

“Even as we may recognize the momentous achievement that marriage recognition represents as a U.S. constitutional matter,� he said, the decision still privileges those gay unions that are modeled after heterosexual marriage, while ignoring “other kinds of connection at the heart of a queer ethic of public sex.�

By the same token, Lyle noted, the advent of so-called Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) — the ongoing administration of antiretroviral drugs to HIV-negative people who are at risk of infection — is a mixed blessing from the standpoint of dignity.

“Certainly the recent research is showing us powerfully that Truvada [the only drug approved for use as PrEP] is curbing HIV infection. There’s no debate about that,� Lyle said. But a prescription for the drug is overpriced, heavily regulated, and accompanied by data collection that Lyle characterized as state surveillance of gay men’s private lives.

“This approach to health,� he argued, “is problematically entangled in capitalistic enterprises and in state-directed efforts to surveil, police, and make decisions for gay men.�

In other words, Engel said, concealed within the seeming progress of sanctioned gay marriage and of sex made safe by Truvada is the same old refusal to comprehend “queer world-making practices.�

“While these efforts ostensibly return dignity to denigrated citizens — a lot of my friends and colleagues have talked about how PrEP allows individuals to have sex without fear for the first time — they do not engage deliberately with what exactly was taken in the first place, and how, and for what reasons, that taking occurred.�

The New York Daily News gave staff writer Matt Gagne ’04 an assignment he’s been training for since his ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ days: Cover the NCAA men’s basketball tournament from a sports bar in Manhattan. With a couple of friends, including a chum from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Gagne watched the first-round games from the ESPN Zone in Times Square. “Others came and went, but Mike and Dave were in it for most of the haul,” wrote Gagne in his story, peppered with ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ references. “They had dozens of bracket pages spread out all over the table, some neatly stored in a three-ring binder while others were crumpled like old ATM receipts. At times they looked like teachers correcting homework; other times it felt like our restaurant tab was riding on the last horse race at the Meadowlands.”

The countdown has begun, Lollapalooza is standing on its last leg, humidity has hit Chicago hard, and brussel sprouts are finally in season. Among other things, summer is ending. In about two weeks I am leaving my beautiful city and heading for another. Many of my friends from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ have been working in New York this summer – as receptionists, interns, button sorters, etc.. – and I am finally making my way up to their subletted apartments. I’ll be driving up there with a good friend of mine who I went to high school with and is now my peer at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ as well. Since she’s an all-star field hockey player for the Bobcats, she’s heading to a team camp to train just a couple of days after we hit up our New York City hosts. I, on the other hand, have the pleasure of roaming streets of Manhattan, wandering corners of Brooklyn, and discovering the Bronx for about 10 days.

Being home and preparing to head back up to Maine naturally makes me think of the end of the summer when I will be heading north for my sophomore year at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.

Rob Farnsworth smiles during a poetry reading and discussion convened by chaplain Bill Blaine-Wallace, part of a series exploring the role of passion and engagement. Chloe Viner ’09 of Rowley, Mass., is at left. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.

The cliché is effective, acknowledging his concern for process. But after the recuperative postponement, I have to ask Farnsworth if a student of his could effectively use such a cliché, straightforward and without irony, in a piece of fiction or poetry.

No, he says, but then offers how a grad school professor at Columbia did once talk about rescuing clichés “by following them back to their literal roots. In some cases they can be excavated and played with. But that demands a willingness to play around in the sandpit that is the cliché.�

I smile; Farnsworth has reintroduced “sand� in a way that’s both sly and, importantly, instructive: the craft of writing isn’t sandbox stuff.

When I arrive in his Pettigrew office, the slightly flushed-with-fever Farnsworth is staring at his bookshelf as if trying to find a star in a suddenly jumbled sky. “I’m looking for a book,â€� he says to the wall. “I know what its spine looks like…but I long ago stopped trying to keep my books in alphabetical order.â€�

Now, most every professor has a well-used bookshelf, but you can easily imagine books leaving Farnsworth’s shelves like blocks at the beginning of a Jenga game, for reading is the cornerstone habit that Farnsworth demands from his writing students. The apprentice writer must read “omnivorously,� he says, because the motivation to write seriously should “come from wanting to participate in the spellcasting that reading makes you aware of. It should make you say, ‘I want to add my voice to that. I want to sing along with that, descant with that.’�

Craig Teicher ’01 is one of two young-alum spellcasters and former Farnsworth protégés who won first-book prizes in 2007. He received the Colorado Prize for Poetry for Brenda is in the Room and Other Poems, while Gabe Fried ’96 won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Making the New Lamb Take.

Both express an appreciation for Farnsworth that borders on wonderment. “My life as it is wouldn’t exist except for Rob,� says Fried, an editor at Persea Books in New York City.

Teicher, also an editor in New York City (at Publishers Weekly, where he’d just interviewed novelist Elizabeth Strout ’77 about her new book, Olive Kitteridge), arrived at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ trailing a belief in the communal and communional power of poetry. “My family bottomed out a bit in high school,â€� he recalls. “In poetry I found companionship and something to identify with.â€� Farnsworth, right from his first meeting with Teicher, noticed how “earnestâ€� his student was about “what poetry could do. He came with that inkling.â€� Farnsworth says that he and others were merely “operating the bellowsâ€� to fan Teicher’s creative flames.

I share the bellows quote with Teicher, who e-mails me back: “Rob’s being modest. He was my gatekeeper to the ways one could actually participate in literature.� Later, on the phone, he explains. “Here was a guy who, if I said something intelligent in class, was going to come back with something more intelligent that pushed the conversation further with other students, making it bigger and bigger.

“All of a sudden, literature was personal and exciting.�

Farnsworth, who majored in English at Brown and earned an M.F.A. at Columbia, teaches workshop courses in writing at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in addition to literature courses, including one on modern Irish poetry this past winter. “Rob isn’t a Ph.D. scholar kind of guy,â€� says Teicher. “He’s a practicing reader and writer, and you’re not going to find a guy who has, for example, an earthier, more intimate knowledge of 20th-century Irish poetry. He knows what’s in the bones of it.â€�

Widely published, Farnsworth is highly regarded in Maine for his many appearances as a poet, scholar, and facilitator for literary gatherings in small towns and cities.

But there’s more. Teicher and Fried especially praise the restraint in Farnsworth’s mentorship. “He was really good about being cautious and making me aware how hard it is to have a successful career as a poet,� Teicher says. “Rob understood that my college wish to be a poet was very much about my fantasy life, and he didn’t want to be a creature in my fantasy life. Once I was older, and was an adult, he was excited about treating me like one.�

Says Fried, “Rob allowed us to explore our ambitions while making sure we could live with our shortcomings.�

Farnsworth reads and discusses his poetry www.fishousepoems.org

By H. Jay Burns

Noah Davis '05. Photograph by Ryan Heffernan '05.

Half a block behind me, American statesman Thomas Jefferson is lost in conversation with Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor-in-chief. In front of me, three members of a dodgeball team, clad in American Apparel’s finest red and white booty shorts, pass a rubber kickball among themselves. The fourth member of the team and I discuss the difficulties of managing our interns at work.

The occasion is Trick or Drink, the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Halloween tradition, but instead of visiting a few ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ residences on a chilly Lewiston night, our costumed group — representing ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ classes of 2006, 2005, 2004, and 2002 — walks past tire shops and apartment buildings on Fourth Avenue in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Davis and a friend began coaching a youth soccer team in the spring. "From my perspective, the team provides a new way to interact with the community," says Davis. Photograph by Ryan Heffernan '05.

Mustering a quorum for a Brooklyn edition of Trick or Drink wasn’t hard. About 150 alums live in the adjoining Brooklyn neighborhoods of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, and Red Hook, just across the East River. This set of neighborhoods is about 3.5 square miles in size, or equivalent to a chunk of Lewiston bounded by Great Falls and Exit 80 on the south, and the Auburn Mall and Thorncrag Bird Sanctuary to the north. Of those 150 alums, more than 100 are BOLD alums (Bobcats of the Last Decade), with more arriving each passing month.

But more than the numbers, a familiar sense of community in our Brooklyn neighborhoods made it possible to start up a local version of a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ tradition. And for us ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ies, this community vibe is defined in part by the huge scale of what’s around us.

Despite its 8.2 million residents, New York City can be an isolating place. On the subway ride to my office in Soho, I’m surrounded by commuters, yet we’re just individuals thrown into the worst carpool ever, with nothing to do except listen to our iPods, read Esquire, and avoid eye contact. It’s the antithesis of how we navigated the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ quad.

But after work, when I get off the F train at Carroll Street and climb one flight of stairs onto Smith Street, though I’m four blocks from my apartment I know I’m home. The street is filled with mom-and-pop shops, small restaurants, and three-story buildings. There’s the bodega where the owners know my name. The bartenders at Brooklyn Social where I occasionally play pool don’t, but I don’t need Cheers. What I need, and what I get, is better: an almost imperceptible nod of recognition when I enter. That’s enough.

Looking back, I was drawn to this section of Brooklyn for many of the same reasons I chose ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. More than 100,000 people live in these neighborhoods, but there’s an undeniable sense of community. Like ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Lewiston, it feels real, not quaint. “Very neighborhoody,” says John Scott Johnson ’04, a former Park Slope resident.

Current and longtime Park Slope resident Doug Olney ’81 has exited the young-alum ranks but easily makes the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½-Brooklyn connection. When he looks around he sees, quite literally, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. “My neighborhood was developed around the same time as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the late 1800s and early 1900s, so the style is similar to buildings like Coram and Hedge,” he says. “Despite renovation and renewal in the area, the essential features remain recognizable, like when you return to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for Reunion.”

Noah Davis '05, who says his Park Slope neighborhood meets the "need to connect," pauses on Smith Street near his apartment. Photograph by Ryan Heffernan.

Craig Teicher ’01, a published poet and editor at Publishers Weekly, decamped to Brooklyn four years ago after living in a “very expensive closet” in Manhattan for two years during graduate school at Columbia. He moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Court Street that costs about as much as his “closet,” and now lives there with his wife and 10-month old child. “I love the on-the-fly social aspect of the neighborhood,” says Teicher, who keeps remembering ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ friends that live close by during our phone conversation.

Though cheap rents initially drew many of us here, we’ve found a place that meets more than a financial need — a need to connect. “ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ taught us how to create a sense of community and then take that wherever we go,” says Sara Kravitz ’04, who lives in Cobble Hill, a historically Italian neighborhood known for its family-run shops.

This spring, a friend from high school and I started coaching an under-12 soccer team. Another friend, Chet Clem ’05, the stalwart goalie of my ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ intramural soccer teams, occasionally helps. At first, our players’ parents couldn’t understand why we were volunteering: “You guys don’t, um, have kids, right?” But our enthusiasm won them over. From my perspective, the team provides a new way to interact with the community. Doug Olney, a Park Slope resident since 1983, knows how it works — Brooklyn’s many, many communities” creates alluring possibilities for civic involveme’nt. “It really pulls you in and stays with you.”

There are, of course, grumblings about the area’s gentrification. The average Park Slope rent has almost tripled since 2005, and American Apparel and Urban Outfitters are slowly replacing tiny boutiques. Soon the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ crew might be priced out, but the BBQs will continue at apartments in another part of Brooklyn. Bobcats know how to find each other.

By Noah Davis ’05

A rhetoric major, Noah Davis ’05 is an associate editor at mediabistro.com in New York and a staff writer at Goal.com. As a freelancer, he published features in The Onion‘s AV Club, Penthouse, and Time Out New York.