The "death camp" reference is fallacious. In the 1970s, gay and bisexual men walked freely into bathhouses and had sex with strangers. The Internet digital magazine Salon posted an article in late 1997 by writer David Horowitz called "The Boys in the Bathhouses." Horowitz calls bathhouses "death camps of contagion." Is anybody else as tired of the Holocaust analogies as I am? In the 1940s, European Jews were rounded up and left in concentration camps to be killed. Supporters were only able to gather 4,000 of the 10,500 signatures needed to put a measure on the November ballot, but they vow to try again.Ĭondemnation of this movement has been quick and sharp. First, a group called Community United for Sexual Privacy (CUSP) formed in 1997 to ask the question, "What gave the city the right to say gay men can't go behind closed doors?" Then another coalition loosely led by longtime activist Michael Petrelis called the old Department of Health regulations homophobic and launched the ballot campaign. In San Francisco, America's gay capital, reopening bathhouses is a big thing. In fact, these are the only people I can imagine doing something like this. Oh yes, I can just imagine San Franciscans heading to the polls to vote on whether or not to reopen gay bathhouses. Today, however, some Bay gays are revisiting the issue and even trying to launch a ballot initiative to reopen the bathhouses. The bathhouses closed one by one either because they refused to adopt the guidelines or due to diminishing patronage.
Bathhouse owners and activists balked at the guidelines. You can probably guess the rest of this story. Ultimately, by court order, the bathhouses were allowed to remain open, but were required to remove all private rooms and hire monitors (one for every twenty patrons) to ensure no unsafe sex acts were occurring and expel patrons engaging in unsafe sex practices. But because it was a local rather than state authority, about a half dozen bathhouses reopened shortly to challenge the regulation. That's because the San Francisco Department of Public Health issued an order closing the baths in October 1984 at the height of AIDS panic in the city, claiming they were a public nuisance facilitating multiple unsafe sexual contacts. “With PrEP, U=U and other advancements in sexual health, bathhouse restrictions are antiquated and stigmatizing.Ironically, the same city that churns out so much gay porn and supports a number of commercial sex clubs has no gay public bathhouses. “It’s time for regulations that were put in place at a time of fear and a lack of knowledge to catch up with the progress we’ve made in the fight to end AIDS,” Joe Hollendoner, CEO of San Francisco AIDS Foundation, said in the press release. The ordinance, led by Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, will help “decriminalize sexuality” according to a press release by the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. That could change after the COVID-19 pandemic is over (this new ruling will not affect the city’s reopening timeline). They specifically targeted sex clubs and gay bathhouses, and while sex clubs eventually reopened in the city after shuttering their doors, gay bathhouses never did, according to the Bay Area Reporter. These regulations were put in place in 1984, when the AIDS crisis was devastating gay communities in San Francisco. It will also remove decades-old policies that required these businesses to monitor sexual activities and prohibited private rooms and locked doors. This will amend the Heath Code, requiring the Director of Health to “adopt minimum health and safety standards” for commercial adult sex venues. Gay bathhouses could have an easier time returning to San Francisco, after the board of supervisors approved an ordinance that would ease restrictions for adult sex venues on July 21 with a unaminous vote.