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San Diego has removed an AIDS-era law regulating gay bathhouses, almost four decades after it was introduced during one of the darkest periods of the HIV epidemic.
The City Council voted unanimously to repeal the ordinance, which was first adopted in 1988 and amended in 1991.
City officials acknowledged that the law contained language that was outdated, inaccurate and offensive towards gay and bisexual men.
What did the San Diego gay bathhouse law say?
The ordinance was unusually explicit about its purpose.
It described strict regulation of bathhouses as a way to prevent gay and bisexual men from having sex and transmitting HIV.
Its rules included hygiene requirements and provisions requiring establishments to provide HIV and AIDS education.
The law had not been actively used by police or code-enforcement authorities for years, but it remained written into the city’s municipal code.
Council President Joe LaCava argued that the fact the ordinance was not being enforced was no reason to leave discriminatory language on the books.
The provision was reportedly rediscovered almost by accident by a member of his staff while searching through city regulations.
Bathhouses were treated as a threat during the AIDS crisis
Gay bathhouses occupied a complicated place during the early HIV and AIDS epidemic.
For generations, they had provided spaces where gay and bisexual men could meet relatively privately at a time when homosexuality was heavily stigmatised.
When AIDS emerged in the 1980s, however, bathhouses became targets for government regulation and closure.
Many authorities regarded them primarily as sites where HIV was being transmitted.
That often ignored another part of the story.
Community organisations and some bathhouses themselves became important places for safer-sex education, HIV testing and referrals to healthcare.
San Diego County health official Patrick Loose told KPBS that gay and bisexual men had already begun changing sexual behaviour before the ordinance was adopted – reducing partners, using condoms and developing grassroots safer-sex initiatives.
HIV prevention looks very different today
The science of HIV has changed enormously since 1988.
Effective antiretroviral treatment can now reduce HIV in the body to an undetectable level, meaning it cannot be sexually transmitted – the principle known as U=U, or Undetectable = Untransmittable.
PrEP can also dramatically reduce the risk of acquiring HIV.
Health campaigners increasingly argue that stigma, rather than sexuality itself, remains one of the barriers preventing people from testing and accessing treatment.
That makes language presenting gay men themselves as a public-health threat particularly outdated.
Other US cities are doing the same
San Diego is not alone in revisiting laws created during the AIDS crisis.
San Francisco repealed its own bathhouse restrictions in 2024, while Minneapolis removed a long-standing ban earlier this year. New York has also been considering changes to old restrictions.
Removing the San Diego ordinance will not transform LGBTQ+ rights overnight.
The law was not even being enforced.
But laws also tell a story about the attitudes of the period in which they were written.
For almost 40 years, San Diego’s municipal code still carried language born from an era when fear of AIDS frequently became fear of gay men themselves.
That language has finally gone.
