Excising a decades-old police code section that requires bathhouses in San Francisco not to have rooms with locked doors, as is traditionally a feature of establishments with queer male clientele, received the backing Thursday from a supervisors committee. As it happens, its two members who voted in support of doing so are gay men who have signed on as co-sponsors of the legislation.
As the Bay Area Reporter first reported in October, the outdated police code known as Article 26 adopted in the 1970s has been hindering efforts by a number of parties interested in operating gay bathhouses in the city. Even more problematic than the locked doors ban is the code requiring owners of public bathhouses to keep a daily register of their patrons that at any time can be demanded to be seen by either police or a health department employee.
It must include not only people's names and home addresses but also their hour of arrival, and which room or cubicle they were assigned at the bathhouse. Those seeking permits to open bathhouses brought the police code provisions to the attention of gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who represents the city's LGBTQ Castro district at City Hall and, for years, has championed seeing the return of such businesses.
Last month, he introduced the ordinance to repeal Article 26 from the police code, and the Board of Supervisors' Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee took it up November 14. With Chair District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani absent, it passed 2-0 with Vice Chair District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio and District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey sending it to the full board with a positive recommendation.
The out committee members did so without comment other than Engardio asking to join Dorsey as a co-sponsor of Mandelman's ordinance. The full board will now vote on it Tuesday, and due to it being an ordinance, will need to do so a second time before it is sent to Mayor London Breed for a final sign off.
"Colleagues, I have been working on this for quite a while, since 2020," noted Mandelman. "The bad news is each year we seem to find a new challenge in the way of allowing ... queer bathhouses to reopen in San Francisco."
Nonetheless, the "good news," noted Mandelman, is that "these roadblocks" in the city's codes are being found because there are people interested in operating traditional gay bathhouses again in the city. His office has heard from four parties who would like to do so, Mandelman had told the B.A.R. in September, none of whom spoke at Thursday's hearing.
Among the speakers who did was longtime gay city resident Harry Breaux, who frequented the bathhouses in the 1970s. He called them "the gay version of golf courses," equating them to how straight men have long found camaraderie and friendship on the links and in the clubhouse.
Reopening the bathhouses, said Breaux, would "allow for more opportunities for gay-oriented men to make connections. Many cities outside of San Francisco, some outside of the U.S., know this and support the freedom for gay men to establish connections in ways, perhaps, heterosexual people don't understand."
As the B.A.R. has covered over the last four years, Mandelman has led the legislative push to remove what many consider to be anachronistic local laws governing the operation of bathhouses in San Francisco. Most were enacted in the early 1980s during the start of the AIDS epidemic as an attempt to control the little-understood disease that was decimating the city's gay male population.
When the San Francisco Department of Public Health put into effect regulations banning private rooms with locked doors at bathhouses and requiring staff to monitor the sex of their patrons, the result was a de facto ban on gay bathhouses in San Francisco. Most closed their doors, while those remaining became sex clubs without locked rooms for rent.
With the transmission of HIV now preventable due to medications like PrEP, and new infections each year now falling below the 150 case mark in the city, AIDS advocates and LGBTQ leaders contend there is no longer a need to restrict traditional bathhouses from operating in San Francisco. Instead, they see them as being places that could foster closer connections among their queer patrons and provide health workers venues to educate people about HIV prevention services and other issues.
"The world of HIV prevention and LGBTQ sexual health has changed dramatically since the 1970s and 1980s," said Laura Thomas, senior director of HIV and harm reduction policy at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
She told Mandelman at the hearing that she was "appreciative" of his efforts to update the city codes in order to "undo the moral panics of previous generations."
The Board of Supervisors and Breed rescinded those rules embedded in the city's health code in 2020. Due to the COVID pandemic, the health department didn't make the change official until January 2021, as the B.A.R. reported at the time.
Zoning hiccup
It was hoped then that its doing so would pave the way for gay bathhouses to open again in the city. But another hiccup occurred when it was discovered the city's zoning rules were too restrictive and prevented adult sex businesses from operating in most of the city.
Thus, Mandelman went back to his board colleagues in 2022 and asked them to pass an ordinance to allow such businesses to open in the city's historic LGBTQ neighborhoods, such as the Castro, Tenderloin, and South of Market, as the B.A.R. reported. He had hoped that would be the final hurdle facing gay bathhouses that he would need to address.
Then came the need for his third ordinance dealing with cleaning up the police code rules for gay bathhouses. They had been enacted due to concerns about who was operating them and what took place inside the businesses years prior to the health department instituting its de facto ban on the establishments.
"It puts the police department in, sort of, the center of deciding whether or not bathhouses of all sorts should be allowed to open. This, we learned, is not something the police department is interested in doing or comfortable in doing," said Mandelman.
Carl Nicita, the principal legislative liaison for the San Francisco Police Department, told the supervisors committee Thursday that the agency supports Mandelman's ordinance, which dates to 1973. He said the agency's permit unit "has received several inquiries" from people who want to co-locate an adult sex venue with a bathhouse.
"SFPD will no longer have a role in permitting bathhouses. But SFPD will still be responsible for criminal investigations for any reports made," said Nicita about such businesses.
Following the hearing, Mandelman told the B.A.R. he is confident he has the votes among the full board to adopt the ordinance.
"Because the board has voted, I think, unanimously for each of the prior pieces of bathhouse legislation, and I have no reason to believe this one would be treated differently," he said.
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