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“The monitoring is a farce,” Carrazza says. He says the clouded judgment, coupled with the energy - and confusion - surrounding an orgy is a recipe for unsafe sex. In order to ease the inhibitions of having sex in a public setting, he argues, men might feel the need to drink or take drugs before going to a sex club. The lack of private rooms turns sex clubs into giant, open orgies, he explains. They will have the private space to communicate and be intimate with one person away from the pressure outside.”Ĭarrazza argues that the city's position actually encourages more unsafe sex. “We believe that with locked doors, people are more inclined to have safer sex. “We're demanding science that says locked doors increases HIV transmission,” Pasquarelli says. A new generation of bathhouses would not cause the same rampant, unprotected behavior as before, they say.ĭave Pasquarelli, an ACT UP member, says San Francisco is backward in its continued ban of private rooms since most other major cities - even neighbors Berkeley and San Jose - have large gay bathhouses that allow them. Some activists now argue that the restriction on private rooms is no longer needed since “safe sex” has become such an ingrained message within the gay community. Bathhouse hybrids were allowed to open, and today's sex clubs were born. The owners agreed to follow guidelines that required monitored areas, safe-sex education, and a ban on private rooms. People questioned how it was really contracted, and some said closing the baths was about sexual oppression and not a public health measure.”īut as knowledge of HIV transmission and the value of protected sex increased, bathhouse owners and AIDS educators formed a “healthy sex” coalition and struck a deal with the Health Department. “There was a lot of ignorance about AIDS back then. “It was quite a nasty, visceral debate,” recalls Gustavo Suarez, spokesman for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, one of the city's oldest AIDS groups.
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When the bathhouses were first shut down in 1984, the closings prompted a contentious uproar among a divided gay community. The dispute is rekindling a long-simmering argument about how far the city should go in trying to compel safe sex among consenting gay men. “That means being able to walk through and see whether or not people are having safe sex.” “In order to minimize new HIV cases, congregate sex businesses need to uphold safe-sex rules,” Katz says. “Treat people like animals, and they'll behave like animals.” Carrazza, 45, remembers the old bathhouses, and feels the privacy they afforded was a bit more “civilized.”Ĭarrazza and other activists, including members of ACT UP, have recently begun agitating for a return to the original bathhouse, protesting at public Health Department meetings and taking their argument directly to Mitch Katz, the city's openly gay health director. “The public environment is not conducive to intimacy - it dehumanizes the sexual experience,” says Richard Carrazza, a sex club patron. They argue that the city's efforts to police safe-sex policies have outlived their usefulness, and are calling on Health Department officials to bring back the traditional bathhouses, and specifically the private rooms. Put off by the carnival atmosphere of today's sex clubs, some gay activists now would like to restore a bit of dignity to the process. As a result, at clubs like Eros, men have sex in one large room filled with bunk beds, where there are often as many gawkers - and gropers - as bedmates. At a half-dozen “sex clubs” across the city, sex must now be had out in the open, so monitors can make sure the patrons are using condoms. What's the difference? The absence of the tiny, private rooms - often just big enough to accommodate a bed - that were a hallmark of the original bathhouses.
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Yet today, across the street from the Safeway at Church and Market streets, sits a two-story building with mirrored doors housing the Eros club, where gay men can still wear a towel, enjoy a sauna, and cruise for sex.īut Eros is not a bathhouse. Officially, there have been no bathhouses in San Francisco since 1984, when health officials grappling with the AIDS crisis shut down the places where gay men could don a towel, relax in saunas, cruise for sex, and slip into tiny, private rooms for impromptu trysts.