“The public environment is not conducive to intimacy - it dehumanizes the sexual experience,” says Richard Carrazza, a sex club patron. They argue that the city's efforts to police safe-sex policies have outlived their usefulness, and are calling on Health Department officials to bring back the traditional bathhouses, and specifically the private rooms. Put off by the carnival atmosphere of today's sex clubs, some gay activists now would like to restore a bit of dignity to the process. As a result, at clubs like Eros, men have sex in one large room filled with bunk beds, where there are often as many gawkers - and gropers - as bedmates. At a half-dozen “sex clubs” across the city, sex must now be had out in the open, so monitors can make sure the patrons are using condoms. What's the difference? The absence of the tiny, private rooms - often just big enough to accommodate a bed - that were a hallmark of the original bathhouses.
Yet today, across the street from the Safeway at Church and Market streets, sits a two-story building with mirrored doors housing the Eros club, where gay men can still wear a towel, enjoy a sauna, and cruise for sex.īut Eros is not a bathhouse. Officially, there have been no bathhouses in San Francisco since 1984, when health officials grappling with the AIDS crisis shut down the places where gay men could don a towel, relax in saunas, cruise for sex, and slip into tiny, private rooms for impromptu trysts.