The US State Senators On A Mission To Bring Back NY’s Gay Bathhouses

Two openly gay New York State policymakers are attempting to bring back sex-on-premises bathhouses. Senator Erik Bottcher and Assembly Representative Tony Simone, both elected officials of the state, took to Instagram on August 5, announcing their campaign to repeal out-dated, AIDS-era legislation that banned adult saunas in the area over forty years ago.

It comes after other jurisdictions around the US, Minneapolis and San Francisco among them, are investigating the merit of their old health policies enacted at the height of the epidemic. 

“NYC’s adult saunas/bathhouses were an integral part of queer life for nearly a century,”Bottcher wrote to his followers. “In 1985, during the panic of the AIDS epidemic, New York ordered them closed. Emergency measures somehow became permanent policy.”

The New York Ban On Gay Bathhouses Is Outdated

Bathhouses were prohibited from doubling as sex venues in New York State in 1985 for posing a “threat to public health”. However, as Bottcher points out, this was at a time when confirmed HIV/AIDS infections, of which half were fatal, numbered in the thousands, and PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) did not yet exist.

“The science has changed,” Bottcher continued. “Prevention has changed. Treatment has changed. It’s time for our laws to change too. The ban is simply pushing people into less safe, unregulated settings, undermining the very public health goals it was meant to serve.”

Thus, Bottcher and Simone have proposed the Public Health Modernization Act. The act would effectively repeal the ban of gay bathhouses, and instead impose research-based safety, operations, and licensing standards on venues seeking to adopt sex-on-premises offerings. 

This would be an enormous leap forward for empirical LGBTQ+ health policy, one in stark contrast to the Trumpian preference to simply ignore HIV/AIDS and research-based health policy altogether.

While the act itself does not detail these new operating rules, it instead calls on the New York State Department of Health to develop them. If enacted, the agency would be required to establish these new regulations within 180 days.