Will Bathhouses Return to San Francisco Anytime Soon? (Maybe)

The website GayCities reports that bathhouses, once a fixture in the city, are set to return to San Francisco. "After running a five-year gauntlet through the city's byzantine laws governing traditional gay bathhouses, officials promoting their return repealed the last of a set of archaic regulations blocking them late last year."

It is up to prospective planners and investors to make it happen.

The drive to bring the baths back started in 2019 by gay City Supervisor Rafael Mandelman. "The legislative process has been a little more involved than I had hoped or expected," he told GayCities.

"I've been involved in San Francisco politics and queer community politics for a couple of decades, and all through that period there were folks in the queer community, older folks who remembered the bathhouses and either felt that it had been a mistake to close them in the first place or felt that it was time to get them reopened."

He continued: "Younger people who'd heard about the bathhouses couldn't understand why San Francisco – uniquely, apparently – how this very queer city doesn't have these kinds of facilities. You could travel in cities around the country and around the world and find bathhouses, but not in the gayest city in the world, San Francisco, and that seemed weird. And I agree."

The pandemic added to the delay in getting the changes in city ordinances passed, but with help of two co-sponsers, gay Supervisors Matt Dorsey and Joel Engardio, the regulations passed in the 1980s were repealed.

"As AIDS ravaged the gay community in the 1980s, city officials and activists debated the baths' role in spreading the disease and the personal freedoms their closure would infringe on." GayCities reports. "An image in San Francisco's GLBT museum records gay men demonstrating at City Hall wearing only those short white towels; one protester holds up a sign reading, 'Out of the Baths and into the Ovens!'

"Onerous new regulations adopted in response to the epidemic led to the last of the baths closing in 1987."

But obstacles still remained. "We weren't actually done," Mandelman said, "because when people who would be bathhouse operators started trying to figure out how to get one open, they realized that from a public health perspective they could do it, but from a zoning perspective they couldn't, because there wasn't the zoning to allow for these kind of facilities."

Gay Cities relates that "zoning changes were adopted to allow adult sex venues, including bathhouses, in parts of the city that have a historical connection to San Francisco's queer community, including Upper Market and the Castro, the Tenderloin, and present-day SOMA."

Then the repeal movement hit another snag: Article 26 in the SFPD code, "an ordinance adopted in 1973 that mandated bathhouse owners to maintain a daily register of patrons, including their names and addresses, the time they arrived, how long they stayed, and their room number," Gay Cities detailed.

Mandelman said that this was "going to make it hard" for entrepreneurs to get permits.

"Actually enforcing it would be wasteful of police resources, possibly unconstitutional, and of little or no value to the cause of public health and safety," Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District board member David Hyman pointed out last fall.

"The Board of Supervisors – and the SFPD – agreed. Article 26 was repealed in December," adds GayCities.

"So I hope that, as a legislative matter, the job is done, and now it's on the entrepreneurs," Mandelman said.

"The supervisor shared that at least four [entrepreneurs] are on that list. Some publicly lobbied for the baths' return but aren't talking after permitting roadblocks were cleared," the GayCities report continues.

Mandelman advised prospective owners as they contemplated what form their projects would take.

"If you think about the great bathhouses around the world, they're not just sex venues," he said. "They're a kind of community center. Some have restaurants, bars, and lounges. I think the better bathhouses are bathhouses where there's a lot going on. And that's both a good thing financially for the people who are trying to operate them, and then I think actually makes for a better experience for patrons in those establishments."