I don’t have a cite. But shortly after the age of AIDS, they reportedly started closing down the gay bathhouses. (I remember in New York they closed down Plato’s Retreat, a hetero sex club to avoid the charge of discrimination [yeah right]. I digress.)
Anyway this is just another example of the mommy state run awry IMHO. Gay people won’t stop having sex if you do that. They’ll just find different places to do. Phew, really.
Anyway I do actually have a better idea for those who still think it’s a good idea. Why not leave the bathhouses open. But mandate safe sex practices there. Those who don’t will be politely asked to leave.
Gay bathhouses do have free condoms (& lube), signs encouraging safer sex, and usually partner with a clinic to offer HIV testing on a regular basis. Actually mandating condom use wouldn’t be practical. The parties involved are consenting adults and unlikely to report themselves to management, while there are public “play areas” most sex (especially anal) happens in private cubicle like rooms. Even in the public areas you’d need to have staff making invasive “spot checks”.
You don’t really have a good grasp of what AIDS was in the early 1980s. For one thing, it was often called “gay cancer.” More importantly, no one knew how it spread, except that it hit the gay community really hard, and many members of the gay community congregated at bathhouses. If you want a 21st Century comparison, think about Legionnaires Disease. Why was it disproportionately hitting hospitals, nursing homes, and hotels? Eventually, somebody finally determined it was spread by contaminated air conditioning units. Is it nanny statism to close a hotel when an outbreak of disease is traced to it? Because public health officials STILL do that.
Also, in the 1980s, bathhouses (and hetero sex clubs, for that matter) were not exactly embracing the idea that their patrons were passing around sexually transmitted diseases (not just HIV) and fought inspections and regulations at every step.
As for those “who think it’s still a good idea,” I don’t know anyone in my straight, senior citizen, white bread subculture who thinks closing down gay hangouts is preferable to any group of non-monogamous people practicing safe sex.
Which safe sex practices do you mandate? These days Truvada maintenance therapy for those who are not infected is probably far far safer for HIV prevention than condoms. And how do you check for that?
And then you’d best mandate safe sex practices for heterosexuals too, no?
I don’t get why you want to debate something on only vaguely remember that happened 35 to 40 years ago at the start of a mysterious new epidemic. Don’t you think it’s just as likely that bath houses had to close due to lack of insurance? That straight sex clubs also could spread HIV? That enough customers had died that it was no longer a viable business model?
One thing I recall: In the early '70s, the early days of the Gay Lib movement, many gay men, especially in the big cities, went totally wild – having 3 or 4 sex partners a day*, taking drugs so they could dance all night, getting hardly any sleep. So, one early theory (still adhered to by a minority, believe it or not) was that AIDS was not an infectious disease, but simply a matter of their wearing out their immune systems through that extreme lifestyle. A theory that was discredited when the disease spread to people who had never practiced such a lifestyle, and, later, by scientific research.
Old joke:
What’s the worst thing about AIDS (apart from the obvious)?
Trying to convince your mother that you’re Haitian!
Moral: Men are sex pigs. Gay or straight, men are sex pigs. If I could have sex with three or four women a day, I would, consequences be damned.
They still exist in London which makes me think they exist elsewhere. [url=https://chariots.co.uk/]Chariots is one of the main ones. They offer “testing services” which makes it highly likely that they also offer free condoms. Not sure what else they could do to police whether someone’s put a condom on or not.
Saunas (bath houses) and sex clubs exist in most major European cities, and usually provide free condoms. I’m not sure many have the touring testing services available in London, but it’s not difficult to find out where the sexual health services are.
To understand the controversy over the bathhouse shutdowns, read Randy Shilts’ “And The Band Played On”.
"Shilts (called) out the gay community in its inaction to prevent the disease…There was also the matter of the bathhouses, which Shilts advocated to shut down, despite harsh resistance against such an action in the gay community. Shilts noted that what little that was achieved in the bathhouses was small signs in corners warning about AIDS and condoms that were provided to those who asked. Nobody did. Shilts was harshly critiqued for his stance at the time."*
There was nothing “mommy state” about a common-sense public health measure to restrict the rapid spread of a (then) fatal disease for which there was nothing but supportive treatment, and the etiology/epidemiology of which was poorly understood.
I actually remember the night when all the back-room places in New York City closed. It was literally one night. I was meeting some friends at midnight at a bar and we were going to go to the Anvil. We walked over, and it was closed. Locked, lights out, sign ripped from the wall.
A few blocks away, the same was true of the Mineshaft. And other places that permitted on-premises sex.
It was easy enough for the City to closed these joints. None of them were operating legally. None of them had liquor licences. All of them stayed open way past closing time (the Anvil used to stay open until noon). All of them were cheating on taxes. There were a lot of rumors about the ownership of the clubs. The bribery going on must have been enormous.
Was this the “mommy state” running amok? I don’t think so. By this time (1985) it was known that HIV was transmitted sexually. While organizations like GMHC had been trying to encourage safer sex practices in the clubs, it wasn’t working. Unsafe sex was happening on a huge scale all up and down West Street. I think New York City did the right thing. There was a serious public health crisis happening, and that’s exactly what government is for. I see it as akin to mandating vaccination for children entering school.
Of course, to effectually mandate safe sex in gay bathhouses would require some sort of inspector, popping his head into the cubicles, and carrying a cattle prod.
I suspect *all *the gay bars in the Village were mob-controlled back then, and getting behind in its payoff schedule was the actual reason it was raided.
That said, that was a different situation than that of the back-room places in the 80s. For one thing, the Stonewall actually was a bar, with a liquor license. It operated within the legal closing hours. What it was doing that was illegal was allowing gay men to congregate there and wear drag, which was illegal (then). For another, I don’t believe it was an on-premises sex club.
A place like the Anvil in the 80s did not have a liquor license, although it certainly sold huge quantities of beer and booze. It was not a bar. It did not operate within legal closing hours. Drugs were consumed (and sold) there on a massive scale. Sex took place more or less openly (upstairs was dancing and drag shows, downstairs was sex). It called itself a private club, but in practice, anyone could enter. Was it mob-controlled? I don’t know, but that was certainly the rumor. Same with the Mineshaft, which was purely a sex club that sold liquor (three stories of some very weird sex – I’m amazed that it was allowed to exist as long as it did, and I’m certain that huge payoffs were involved).
So it was very, very easy for the City of New York to close those places. They were in flagrant violation of just about every law you could think of. For instance, in hindsight, I’m horrified by their total non-compliance with the fire code. If there had ever been a fire, the death toll would have been huge.
And, back to the subject of this thread, I think it was for the best that the City shut these places down.
I was in the Mineshaft several times, back in the late 70s-early 80s. Everything you have said about it was true, and I’m still amazed that it was allowed to operate as long as it did, until 1985. I wonder how many of its patrons are still alive.
