In what is hoped will be the last time they need to do so, San Francisco supervisors have once again lent their support to seeing the return to the city of traditional gay bathhouses where patrons will be able to rent locked rooms at the establishments. How soon such a business will open its doors, however, remains unknown.
At least four interested parties this year have reached out to city officials to discuss the permitting process they need to navigate in order to get sign off to operate a bathhouse marketed to queer men. Such facilities vanished in the early 1980s during the start of the AIDS epidemic when local health officials put into effect regulations banning private rooms with locked doors at bathhouses and requiring staff to monitor the sex of their patrons.
The actions were taken with the aim of stopping the spread of the then-emerging deadly disease. They also resulted in a de facto ban on bathhouses, which soon went out of business rather than obey the new rules to operate.
Left behind were gay sex clubs without private spaces, of which just one remains in operation today in the city, Eros in the Tenderloin district that welcomes all men interested in sex with other men. Its owners have repeatedly said over the years they have no desire to install locked rooms.
With AIDS no longer a local epidemic, and new HIV infections in San Francisco falling below 150 a year, many health advocates and LGBTQ leaders no longer see a need for the current codes governing bathhouses to remain in effect. They consider them to be homophobic relics of a prior age.
Since 2020, gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman has spearheaded removing the old bathhouse provisions from the city's various codes. Ones in the health code were excised in 2021, while others in the city's zoning codes were amended the following year to allow for gay bathhouses to be situated in the city's LGBTQ neighborhoods of the Tenderloin, South of Market, and in the Castro district that Mandelman represents at City Hall.
However, a provision in the police code that was added in 1973 remains. In addition to a prohibition on locked rooms in bathhouses, it also requires 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 has thrown up roadblocks for the entrepreneurs who want to reopen a gay bathhouse, prompting Mandelman to once again seek a code change. He has the support of police brass to remove what is known as Article 26 from the city's police code.
And now all 11 members of the Board of Supervisors have lent their support for doing so. They voted unanimously at their November 19 meeting to do away with Article 26.
As doing so requires the adoption of an ordinance, the board will need to vote a second time at its December 3 meeting before sending it to Mayor London Breed to sign. (The supervisors will not meet next Tuesday due to the Thanksgiving holiday on November 28.)
Tuesday's vote came after the two gay supervisors who serve on the board's Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee, Vice Chair District 4 Supervisor Joel Engardio and District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey, voted November 14 to recommend that their colleagues adopt Mandelman's ordinance. Committee Chair District 2 Supervisor Catherine Stefani was absent.
Engardio and Dorsey did so without comment other than Engardio asking to join Dorsey as a co-sponsor of the ordinance, as the Bay Area Reporter reported online that Thursday. The full board also voted this week to adopt the police code change without comment.
At the committee hearing Mandelman had noted how he has been working to allow for the return of gay bathhouses for four years but keeps encountering "roadblocks" to address.
"We thought we were done, but we were not," said Mandelman, noting that, "Article 26 of the police code puts the San Francisco Police Department right at the center of approving and reviewing all applications for bathhouses."
Yet, that "additional" code language, said Mandelman, "seems to be in conflict with what we were trying to do with our prior amendments."
David Hyman, who serves on the board of the city's Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District located in SOMA where many gay bathhouses had been in business, had argued the rules prohibiting traditional gay bathhouses are "hurtful economically" in addition to being no longer necessary.
"My personal view is Article 26 in the police code is archaic, ambiguous, and it is insulting," said Hyman, 72, a gay man who moved to the city in the 1970s and patronized the SOMA bars and clubs then operating. "Actually enforcing it would be wasteful of police resources, possibly unconstitutional, and of no or little value to the cause of public health safety."
Justice Dumlao, community mobilization manager at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation and an advocate with the HIV Advocacy Network, stressed at the committee hearing that the city's public health policies need to be based not on stigma but on "science and evidence." In this case, he pointed to how HIV is now a treatable disease whose transmission is preventable via the use of medications like PrEP and doxyPEP.
"There is no longer a need for these restrictions from the 1970s and 1980s," he said of the city codes governing bathhouses.
Updated, 12/5/24: The article originally had the wrong name for an SFAF staffer who spoke at the hearing. It was Justice Dumlao.
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