Nationally, as of April 27, there were 35,068 cases and 20,241 deaths. Those at highest risk are homosexual men, intravenous drug users and their sexual partners.Īs of April 30, San Francisco reported 3,190 AIDS cases and 1,906 deaths. It is transmitted by sexual contact, by contaminated needles and blood and from an infected mother to her newborn. The AIDS virus attacks the body’s immune system, leaving the victim vulnerable to a variety of infections and tumors. “Most gay men long ago stopped looking to the bathhouses as a place of safety or recreation.” “People are having regular dinner parties and going to movies and things like that,” Paul Boneberg said. “The baths died more of inertia than of monitoring,” said George Mendenhall, a reporter for the Bay Area Sentinel, a local gay newspaper. To others, the era ended long ago with the spread of AIDS. To some gay people here, the closing of the city’s last bathhouse marked the end of an era. A half-dozen remaining gay sex clubs, bookstores and theaters have restricted their patrons to “safe-sex” activities, Delventhal said. Others closed when patronage dropped, leaving only 21st Street Baths. Several bathhouses chose to close rather than monitor their patrons. Ultimately a local judge blocked the shutdown, instead allowing the clubs and bathhouses to stay open if they monitored their patrons and ejected anyone engaging in activities that could spread the AIDS virus. In the 1970s, before AIDS began to appear in the gay community, San Francisco was home to 20 to 30 gay bathhouses and sex establishments, said Paul Boneberg, executive director of Mobilization Against AIDS. We have benefited the community for over 25 years and feel now the time has come to close. A recorded message on the bath’s phone told callers, “We are closed and will not reopen. Neither the bathhouse owners nor their attorney were available for comment. “If they opened up (again) for a bathhouse, they’d be in big trouble.” “They cannot reopen for any sex-oriented business without permission from the courts,” Delventhal said. Calling itself the 'largest sex club in San Francisco,' Blow Buddies opened almost 31 years ago, in August 1988, and its a private club for men over 21 with glory holes, play rooms, and such. But this week, the bathhouse’s owners reached a settlement with the city that called for closure of the bathhouse in exchange for dismissal of the charges, said Deputy City Atty. In April, the San Francisco city attorney’s office had charged 21st Street Baths with violating a 1984 court order requiring clubs to bar sexual activities that could spread acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
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If you want to help that effort, donate to the GoFundMe.The last remaining gay bathhouse in San Francisco closed with hardly a ripple this week, a victim of stricter laws and changing life styles brought about by the AIDS epidemic.
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The worker-owned cooperative nightclub is still hosting events, and the owners promise The Stud is not dead and will come back eventually.
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It’s a topic that is complicated and nuanced and deserves thought and discourse, and that also leaves us grateful that SF still does have two neighborhoods where gay bars reign supreme (the Castro and SoMa), and you can find a watering hole with whatever you fancy: fabulous drag queens, all-night dance parties, hirsute hotties, latex, leather, karaoke, kink, bondage, live music, TV watch parties, and even sports.īefore we leave you to pick out your next drinking destination, a love-filled shout out to The Stud, SF’s oldest and most diverse queer bar/institution, which lost its SoMa home in 2020. On Polk Street, a strip where the first San Francisco Gay Pride Parade took place in 1972, and was once home to 65 gay bars, peep shows, bathhouses, and hotels, only one gay bar, The Cinch, remains. This is especially true in San Francisco where there is only one gay bar left in the Tenderloin ( Aunt Charlie’s Lounge), the neighborhood where the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, the first recorded transgender riot in U.S. The reasons behind this mass exodus are complex-with more mainstream acceptance of LGBTQ+ lifestyles and cultures, such spaces are deemed less “necessary,” and yet they are still necessary for so many reasons, including the fact that these spaces represent a vital piece of our collective history and because progress doesn’t erase the need for safe havens of belonging. Over the past few years, gay bars and queer spaces have been disappearing in San Francisco and across the country at a depressing rate.