From the same people who cracked down on church services during COVID comes the push to reopen gay bathhouses.
Minneapolis considers a series of ordinances that seek, among other aims, to “eliminate stigmatizing language” in existing ordinances and provide “new definitions to be inclusive of establishments where sexual activity between consenting adults may be facilitated.”
In other words, it looks to rescind the bathhouse ban that it belatedly passed in 1988.
More than four decades ago, as AIDS decimated the population of gay men, cities wisely closed the sex clubs that served as the force multipliers of the disease. In a demonstration of how a mania for sex distorts judgment, gay activists compared Ed Koch, Dianne Feinstein, and other liberals (including gays) putting the baths out of business to the Nazis; to everyone else, the baths themselves resembled the concentration camp “showers” that administered poison.
“Out of the Baths, Into the Ovens,” male protestors in towels chanted in response to San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s rather belated shuttering of the bathhouses.
“Now that you’ve succeeded in closing down the baths,” New York Native publisher Charles Ortleb asked epidemiologist Jim Curren, “are you preparing the boxcars for relocation?”
The proponents of the sex clubs showed themselves not just indifferent to human life but dishonest in combining hyperbole with euphemism. At least a restaurant proprietor who touts glass sandwiches on his menu practices truth in advertising. Bathhouses clean up the dirty (and dangerous) in their hygienic name.
This Orwellian quality characterizes the rhetoric of the Minneapolis Safer Sex Coalition, the pressure group focused on reopening that city’s sex clubs after a 38-year ban.
“Social science research tells us that commercial sex spaces, like gay saunas, are important for promoting safer sex practices, enhancing HIV prevention, and increasing access to testing and treatment,” the Safer Sex Coalition contends. “These spaces also enhance feelings of identity, camaraderie, authenticity, and belonging.”
No, those places exist to facilitate anonymous sexual encounters between strangers. That is the alpha and omega of gay bathhouses. And anonymous sexual encounters between strangers does not promote “safer sex practices” or enhance “HIV prevention.”
One might look upon this project to reopen bathhouses more sympathetically if its proponents did not dress up their aims in Newspeak. Bathhouses exist for fleeting, anonymous sexual encounters between men. The presence of posters that admonish patrons to embrace safe sex or a table that distributes free condoms does not erase this reality.
People will contract diseases in these establishments. Some closeted men will pass on these diseases to their wives; upfront gays will pass them on to other gays.
Does not Grindr already exist for this purpose?
The fact that the diseases contracted in the establishments in 2026 will likely kill very few of the patrons, and the diseases contracted in the establishments prior to 1988 did kill very many of the patrons, helps to partly explain the public policy reorientation on sex clubs. It does not explain why the public health crusaders who have established fines for bicyclists who ride without a helmet, frightened youth football programs into extinction, and taxed cigarettes from the respite of trailer-park denizens to a luxury item for the comfortable provide a pass to gay bathhouses.
Big Brother watches us all. But for Black Lives Matter protestors at the height of COVID or gay bathhouse enthusiasts during the post-AIDS era, Big Brother takes a holiday. To paraphrase from another Orwell classic: all humans are equal, but some humans are more equal than others.
Unfortunately, all of those afflicted with the most severe case of buyer’s remorse from Big Daddy’s Bath House, the Locker Room Baths, and other of the long-shuttered Minneapolis institutions cannot testify before the city council to the dangers of such clubs. These new ordinances can resurrect Big Daddy’s Bath House. No such luck awaits that club’s long-dead patrons.
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