San Francisco may finally see gay bathhouses return thanks to the city relaxing rules it brought in at the height of the AIDS crisis.
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city’s governing council, voted unanimously on Tuesday to remove the restrictions on saunas.
They hope the businesses will now ‘reopen as part of the city’s COVID-19 economic recovery’. San Francisco lost its bathhouses in 1984 as AIDS overwhelmed the city’s LGBT+ population.
The city and county branded the bathhouses ‘a public health nuisance’ and even sued bathhouse owners. The court rulings in the lawsuit which followed technically allowed the bathhouses to remain open.