When Minneapolis forced its adult bathhouses to close nearly four decades ago, leaders were desperate to halt the spread of AIDS.
The city had three of the adults-only spa-like venues, often frequented by gay men looking for sex. But with the AIDS epidemic raging, bathhouses were deemed too risky to remain open to the public. In 1988, the city council voted to shut them down.
Patrick Scully, 72, opposed the move at the time and has hoped to see bathhouses reopen ever since. In the last decade, he — alongside LGBTQ+ activists — renewed the charge, decrying the restrictions as outdated and based on discriminatory policies.
On Thursday, the council voted, 9-2, to repeal the 38-year-old ban, joining San Francisco and other cities that have decided to allow bathhouses in recent years. Jason Chavez, the only openly gay Minneapolis city council member, said the restriction had “legalized homophobia.”
The issue was brought to a vote during June — a month in which gay pride is celebrated worldwide — as part of a “Pride in Policy” package, which also included directives for all-gender bathrooms and health care access for transgender patients. It is one of several ways the Minneapolis city council has sought to define itself against restrictive Trump administration policies on immigration and LGBTQ+ freedoms.
“Our community members are currently living through a moment of deliberate and coordinated federal assault on the lives of [LGBTQ+] people,” Chavez said during a news conference after the vote.
The city must finalize regulations before any bathhouses can officially open, but advocates said the repeal reflects a positive step in the revisiting of AIDS-era restrictions still governing sex decades later.
The three Minneapolis bathhouses had risen to prominence in the 1970s and ’80s, said Noah Barth, a public historian who supported the ban being overturned. More than 300 bathhouses popped up across America around that time, according to a representative for Damron LGBT Travel Guides.
Scully, who had moved back to Minneapolis from New York City in the 1980s in hopes of escaping the virus, said bathhouses represented the gay liberation movement. More than a decade had passed since the Stonewall Riots, and seeing bathhouses forced to close felt like a setback, he said.
But as AIDS spread in the early 1980s, health officials feared bathhouses were transmitting the disease, said William Woods, a psychologist who co-edited a book on bathhouse public policy.
San Francisco health officials shut the venues down there in 1984 and New York State followed a year later. The Minneapolis ban went into effect in 1988.
As new antiretroviral medications were developed for HIV/AIDS over the next decade, significantly lowering the likelihood of sexual transmission, activists said bathhouse bans looked more like discrimination than health policy, activists said.
“I don’t think it’s the role of the government to sit in judgment and decide what kinds of spaces can be important to different cultural groups,” Jay Orne, who manages local HIV prevention for one of the groups leading the overturn, told city council members last week.
Aside from pockets in the South, medications have made AIDS less of the visible emergency it once was, said Judy Auerbach, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco who studies HIV policy. She credits that for the overturns of AIDS-era policy.
San Francisco reversed its bathhouse restrictions in 2020. In 2023, the Food and Drug Administration changed regulations that once prevented gay men from donating blood. In May, Louisiana amended laws that allowed people to be criminally charged if they didn’t disclose they were HIV-positive to sexual partners.
In Minneapolis, activists first explored overturning the bathhouse restrictions in 2017, when the ban was used to shut down an underground sex club, Barth said. Six years later, when a traditional sauna had received a violation, activists got the city to remove AIDS-specific language but failed to overturn the ban completely.
The city began studying the issue and a 2024 report provided to council members noted that in six cities that allowed bathhouses without special permitting — including Chicago and Miami — there were no ongoing health concerns specific to bathhouses.
“It’s just a different era,” Woods said of attitudes toward AIDS nationwide.
Council member Robin Wonsley said the bathhouse ban needed to come off the books if Minneapolis wanted to portray itself as a LGBTQ refuge to the Trump administration.
But not everyone saw a need to prioritize overturning the restrictions as Minneapolis recovers from heavy immigration enforcement during the winter and a statewide fraud scandal.
Council member Pearll Warren, who voted against reversing the ban, said people in her community are more concerned “about housing disparities and livability issues.”
A spokesperson for Mayor Jacob Frey (D), in a statement to The Washington Post, said he’d sign the overturn but “wants our focus to remain on providing core City services.”
Even as AIDS-era policies are reversed, Auerbach said she finds herself recounting the “bad old days” to younger generations who weren’t around during the height of the AIDS crisis. If new bathhouses open, she said she hopes they also prioritize rudimentary HIV prevention — passing out condoms or teaching the safe sex practices that were lifelines during the height of the health crisis.
“Those of us who are in the HIV response community struggle with the fact that most Americans don’t think about HIV, aren’t aware of HIV, can’t imagine there’s any risk from it,” Auerbach said.
Woods noted that even during the AIDS epidemic, bathhouses helped spread awareness about the virus before they shuttered under bans or public pressure.
Shutting them down, Scully said, didn’t stop men from being sexually active or contribute to public health. Reversing the bans, he said, was reversing a misstep.
“I’m in my 70s, I don’t have that much time left to wait,” he said. “I want this homophobic law off the books.”
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