Shortly before the pandemic hit, Supervisor Rafael Mandelman brought legislation to effectively re-legalize the old bathhouse model, with privacy and lockable doors intact. “To our surprise, we found out that there wasn't any place for us in SoMa or much of the Transgender District.” “We looked at the the three queer cultural districts specifically where we could locate,” Eros owner Kew Rowe told the Planning Commission at a Thursday meeting. Since Eros is classified as an “adult business” like a strip club or porn shop, they can only operate in certain areas. You would not think there is an interaction between sex and zoning laws, but Eros learned that the hard way that there is when they lost their lease and attempted to move to SoMa. And while the well-known Market Street club and sauna Eros has been around since 1992, even they have been a watered-down version of a bath house, because of a 1989 ruling that outlawed locking doors and required monitors to be keeping track of guests’ behaviors.
True, proper bathhouses have not existed in San Francisco since the mid-1980s, when then-mayor Dianne Feinstein declared war on the popular gay hook-up spots during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Bathhouses were ordered closed in San Francisco at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s, but they’re on the way back, as the SF Planning Commission just approved “adult sex venue” zoning legislation.