Only one gay bathhouse remains in San Francisco, as requirements mandating unlocked doors and registries of patrons have thrown cold water on the bathhouse scene generally. But Supervisor Rafael Mandelman just got those restrictions stripped away.

Gay bathhouses were a raging sex and social scene in SF’s SoMa and Tenderloin neighborhoods up until the HIV-AIDS crisis of the 1980s, when AIDS fears and a wave of strict new regulations pretty much shut them all down. But Supervisor Rafael Mandelman introduced legislation to re-legalize queer bath houses in San Francisco shortly before the pandemic started.

“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 at a Board of Supervisors Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee last week.

Why was he discussing this last week, when he introduced the legislation way back in 2020? The proposal hit a two-year delay because of zoning red tape — bathhouses were no longer a permitted category under SF’s adult business zoning code, and some SF neighborhoods just flat-out no longer allowed for bathhouses in their zoning.

Mandelman pulled a legislative fix, and got the SF Planning Department to approve new zoning that would allow batthouses in April 2022. But by that time, the city’s last remaining bathhouse Eros had closed down after 30 years in the Castro. (Eros did manage to reopen in the Tenderloin in June 2022.)

Yet there were still two sticking points that prevented proprietors from moving forward on opening other new bathhouses. There was a requirement that doors could not be locked in these adult venues. And an Article 26 of the Police Code put police in charge of approving or reviewing bathhouses, and required these venues maintain a “daily register of patrons” that would have had a chilling effect on people wanting to enter the place.

Mandelman got both of those requirements removed Tuesday, in a unanimous board approval of his new, modified, and relaxed SF bathhouse regulations.

“We are finding these roadblocks because there are people who are trying to make their way through the maze and identifying them for us,” Mandelman said at the committee meeting last week. “So each time we find a new roadblock, we try to clear it away.”

And SFPD sounded happy to give up their jurisdiction over bathhouses. “The police department doesn’t have expertise or an interest in this,” SFPD government affairs manager Carl Nicita said at Thursday’s committee meeting. “SFPD will no longer have a role in permitting bathhouses. We would still be responsible for any criminal investigations of any reports made” of incidents originating in bathhouses.

Will there be any new bathhouses because of these loosened regulations? There may be. According to the Bay Area Reporter, “At least four interested parties this year have reached out to city officials to discuss the permitting process they need to navigate in order to get sign off to operate a bathhouse marketed to queer men.”  

Related: Gallery: San Francisco Gay Bathhouse History, In Fliers [NSFW] [SFist]

Image: Eros SF