My Letter to the Editor of Time Out NY

From Time Out New York / Issue 693 : Jan 8–14, 2009 /
What your personal trainer is really thinking

Worst breach of gym etiquette you’ve ever seen?

“Two people having sex in the sauna…but that’s a tie with the two people I caught having sex on a stretch table when I still worked for a facility.”

“Putting gum under benches”

“This dude smelled like a garbage dump. It was so bad, people would leave. The owner of the gym stepped in and actually suspended his membership. This guy smelled so bad, I’m getting sick thinking about it.”

“Too much unsafe gay sex in the steam rooms.”

“Guys wear very tight spandex shorts from the ’80s and you can see all the sweat coming from their ass and their penises sticking out. I even saw some members coming from the locker room and working out naked like nothing happened. The gym manager had to come on the floor and bring them back to the locker room.”

Dear editor,

Re: "Worst breach of gym etiquette you've ever seen?"

It's always fun to see gay sex show up in a list of something titled "worst." In fact, two of the five offending acts are attributed to the frisky gay men of New York's saunas and steam rooms!

Unsafe sex is never cool, I agree. But your garden variety mutual masturbation or oral sex in the steam room may be against the rules (and also the law), but it's hardly a breach of etiquette in New York City. It's the set up in a lot of porn, in fact. The proper etiquette would be to join in, look away, or take your uptight self out of there.

For me, as a gym-goer, the worst breach of gym etiquette usually involves a trainer and his/her client occupying too much space or monopolizing one (and ofter several) pieces of equipment at once. I once went up to a trainer at my gym to ask when she'd be done with a machine and she said, "Oh, we only have about a half hour more." They'd been using it exclusively already for 30 minutes.

Kind regards,
David
Brooklyn, NY