Gay bathhouses san francisco

Prior to that 1984 ordinance, enacted under Mayor Dianne Feinstein, gay bathhouses had proliferated across San Francisco, with many of them concentrated in and around SoMa.

The new ordinance finally passed in November 2024, and there's been some movement on the bathhouse front, with two nascent projects appearing to be on the hunt for space and backers, Castro Baths and New Bathhouse.

"By 2020, with treatments for HIV and PrEP and a whole lot of knowledge that it no longer made sense, and from a public health perspective, we could do better by allowing bathhouses and regulating them," Mandelman said last year.

Currently, there still are no proper queer bathhouses in SF — which are defined by rentable rooms with lockable doors, in addition to showers and spa elements — only the pseudo bathhouse/sex club Eros in the Tenderloin, and the more traditional, non-sexual bathhouse Archimedes Banya.

That drag devotional coincided with the first reports of what would become the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

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. “People are social. Some have restaurants, bars, and lounges. Another prospective bathhouse operator also demurred.

It’s an indication that the competition is heating up among the small coterie of would-be bathhouse toppers, who have draped a white towel over their plans.

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.

Patrons cruised dimly lit labyrinths of private rooms to a thumping disco soundtrack, with stops in the steam room, jacuzzi, and sauna. It offers various facilities including saunas, steam rooms, private cabins, and a gym. And I agree.”

Mandelman started working with community supporters and at the Department of Public Health to determine what they needed to do to usher in the baths’ return.

“There are bathhouses that are not sexual bathhouses, that are not sex venues,” in the city, Mandelman said, like the popular Kabuki Hot Springs in Japantown and the just-opened Alchemy Springs downtown, featuring what they claim is the world’s largest dry sauna.

“But the gay bathhouses that people think of were basically eliminated in the 1980s with court rulings and regulations that prohibited locked doors and required an intrusive level of monitoring of patrons’ activities.”

After a pandemic delay, Mandelman and two co-sponsors, gay Supervisors Matt Dorsey and Joel Engardio, got legislation passed repealing the 80’s-era prohibitions.

“We weren’t actually done” though, 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.”

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The smell of sweat, poppers, chlorine and street weed filled the air.

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If you can imagine it, it happens in a bathhouse. With its diverse offerings and relaxing atmosphere, Archimedes Banya provides a rejuvenating experience for LGBTQ+ individuals and visitors.

Eros

Eros is an LGBTQ+-friendly bathhouse and spa situated in the Castro district of San Francisco.

Has not been good for civic life.

So 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.

But the bathhouse boosters’ work still wasn’t done.

“Some of these folks, again — as they continued to work their way through the approval processes — found that there was some pre-1980s regulation of bathhouses in the police code that was going to make it hard to get their permits.”

Mandelman referred to Article 26 in the SFPD code, an ordinance adopted in 1973 that mandated bathhouse owners maintain a daily register of patrons, including their names and addresses, the time they arrived, how long they stayed, and their room number.

One advocate for the baths’ return, Leather and LGBTQ Cultural District board member David Hyman, called the police overreach “insulting.”

“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,” he said last fall.

The Board of Supervisors — and the SFPD — agreed.

The most popular were located south of Market Street, once a gritty industrial area now home to the tech industry in a rechristened SOMA, on a stretch known as “the Miracle Mile.”

Three thousand gay men a week visited the massive Club Baths at 8th and Howard, which hosted up to 800 customers at any given time.

And there's definitely an untapped market on this side of the Bay among gay men who wouldn't venture to deepest Berkeley for that sort of thing.

Currently there's no timeline for when Maze SF might open, and city approvals for the project are still to come.