Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1999. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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San Francisco Examiner - June 4, 1999
Marianne Costantinou of the Examiner Staff
In a 9-1 vote Thursday night, the HIV Prevention Planning Council passed a motion to recommend to The City's Health Commission that it remove its prohibition against bathhouses and private rooms in gay sex clubs.
But the lopsided vote hardly expressed deep support within the council, which makes HIV policy recommendations to the Health Commission. Seven panel members abstained because they wanted to postpone the vote until the council's next meeting. And nearly half of the council's 32 members were absent.
The council's recommendation went against the views of Dr. Mitch Katz, director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health. He urged that bathhouses and private rooms in sex clubs continue to be banned.
Current public health policy permits gay sex clubs but requires that they provide condoms and monitor sexual activity to ensure safe sex as a way to prevent the spread of AIDS. At the sex clubs, men typically gather in large common rooms and have no privacy even in intimate moments.
The bathhouses were closed in 1984 at the height of the AIDS epidemic as a way to stem the spread of the disease, Katz reminded the members.
But though the number of AIDS deaths and new HIV patients has decreased since then, he said the virus is still spread by unsafe sex.
"The key question is which is safer: A bathhouse or sex club in which there is constant monitoring, or no monitoring?" Katz said.
But if any of the 60 audience members at the four-hour meeting, held at Mission High School, agreed with Katz, they did not get up to the microphone and speak.
Without exception, all the two dozen speakers voiced their support of reopening the bathhouses and of allowing sex clubs to provide private rooms. The most common argument of the bathhouse proponents was that Katz could not provide any evidence that bathhouses or private rooms were dens for unsafe sex.
Rather, the proponents said, bathhouses would provide another forum to dispense information about AIDS and safe sex.
Proponents also argued that evidence does exist that most unsafe sex occurs in bedrooms, and that the lack of privacy at the sex clubs forces people to head to parks, gyms and cars for private trysts, where safe sex was even less likely.
"Denying privacy does not prevent new infections," said David Attyah, of Health Watch, a group of AIDS health advocates. "Monitoring merely relocates sex to other venues, precisely because it drives away men who want anonymity, intimacy, or control over a sexual encounter. These people end up in places that lack the key ingredients to safer behavior: information, support and condoms."
Banning private rooms and bathhouses is like saying to gay men, "We don't trust you," said Todd Swindell, 26, of ACT UP San Francisco, the gay activist group. "It's time to trust the community. The prohibition tactics don't work."
In contrast to the overwhelming support of the bathhouses at the meeting, the council was stormily divided. At times, the bickering on the council was even more impassioned than the gay activists' pleas.
One member accused colleagues who wanted to postpone a vote or who had failed to show up for the meeting of cowardice.
The council, said panel member Shawn O'Henry, "doesn't have the guts to vote."
Others complained that a rush to vote without time to digest the testimonies was just a nod to public pressure.
A. Toni Young was the most vehement proponent of waiting to vote, and was the sole "no" vote on the motion to recommend the bathhouses to the Health Commission. She peered at the mostly white faces in the audience and said she wanted to wait and hear from minority gays.
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