Steam
A Portland gay bathhouse and the chat's longest-running fictional venue, in the corpus continuously since **2020-10-02** and the namesake of at least five 2023 chat-rename events (*The Boys at Steam*, *A Midsummer Night's Steam*, etc.).
Steam
A Portland gay bathhouse and the chat's longest-running fictional venue, in the corpus continuously since 2020-10-02 and the namesake of at least five 2023 chat-rename events (The Boys at Steam, A Midsummer Night's Steam, etc.).
Steam is a Portland gay bathhouse and one of the chat's most durable running references. Mentions of steam appear 355 times in the corpus, spanning from 2020-10-02 to 2026-05-13, making it one of a small handful of single-word references (alongside hoen and shid — see Shidding) that the chat has carried unbroken through six years and three sibling chat ROWIDs. The venue is also the basis of multiple chat names, most notably the 2023 Midsummer Night's Steam trilogy.
Origins
The earliest steam-as-bathhouse reference is by Evan Bbbender on 2020-10-02:
"Can I steam it, and is it funny?"
The earliest fully venue-coded use is from 2020-12-25, when Evan posts in close succession:
"Man, steam is wild tonight." "I pulled an all nighter at steam." — Evan Bbbender, 2020-12-25
Matt responds the same day: "Steam on xmas eve must be a festive place." Within a week Daniel Miller is using the venue as a feature locator ("Is that the Bear den at Steam bath house", 2020-12-31), and by 2021-01-06 Evan has produced "I'm at steam" as a complete sentence — the form that becomes the chat's default ever after.
As a chat name
Between May 2023 and June 2023, Cullen Conway, Evan Bbbender, and Kyle Derrick produced five formal chat renames invoking Steam:
- 2023-05-19 — The Boys at Steam (renamed by Cullen Conway).
- 2023-06-13 — A midsummers night Steam (Kyle Derrick).
- 2023-06-13 — A Midsummer night's Steam (Kyle Derrick).
- 2023-06-13 — A Midsummer Night's Steam (Kyle Derrick).
The June 2023 trilogy — Kyle renaming the chat three times within a single day to progressively-corrected versions of the same Shakespeare reference — is documented in detail in List of chat names and is widely regarded as one of the most committed editorial gestures in the chat's history.
2026 revival
On 2026-02-13, Kyle Derrick posted "Steams logo goes hard af" and followed up moments later with a Wikipedia link to Steam_Portland. The link received a love-tapback from Evan Bbbender — the first and last instance in the corpus of an external Wikipedia article being officially endorsed by the chat.
On 2026-02-20, the chat briefly attempted to determine whether the actor McSteamy was, somehow, the venue's mascot:
"Steams mascot?" — Kyle Derrick, 2026-02-20
Evan Bbbender responded definitively:
"That's juanathan Steamõs" — Evan Bbbender, 2026-02-20
The encyclopedia is unable to disambiguate Juanathan Steamõs but documents the spelling for the historical record.
Cuck parties at Steam
On 2026-02-24 Evan Bbbender introduced what is, by message-volume, the most-referenced classification of the venue:
"Kind of like how we have cuck parties at steam" — Evan Bbbender, 2026-02-24
The phrase is treated by the chat as factual. No party of any kind has been documented in the corpus to have occurred at Steam, cuck or otherwise; the encyclopedia is therefore obligated to consider Evan's claim as theoretical.