Sex and the baths: a not-so-secret report

During the 1984 debate about closing the baths in San Francisco the mayor directed the police to investigate sexual behavior in the bathhouses and write a report for her. The directive had been a secret, but when the community learned of the report, its response was quick and furious. The mayor squelched the report and no one but the report's authors, the mayor, and probably a handful of intermediaries ever saw the written report. In response to this investigation, two local journalists conducted a more open investigation that resulted in a newspaper article for Coming Up!, a lesbian and gay community newspaper published monthly in San Francisco (California). This article is reprinted here in large part because of its scientific rather than journalistic or historical value. These investigators approached their work systematically (certainly much more so than many other scientists, journalists or police professionals at the time), and as a result, their article provides a much more thorough description of what was happening in the baths at that point in the AIDS epidemic. Interestingly, many public policy options considered today were already part of the discussion then and, at times, already in place in the San Francisco bathhouses. Of note, at the time, orgy rooms were considered likely to be contributing to transmission, thus the authors gave particular attention to its presence/absence and use. The original paper was published in the July 1984 edition (pp. 17-22). As with all the reprinted papers in this volume, no editorial changes were made to the paper and only minor typographical errors were corrected. The editor of Coming Up! included a preface to the article in the original publication, and that preface is also reprinted here.