Minneapolis Ends Its AIDS-Era Bathhouse Ban After 38 Years
For 38 years, the doors stayed locked. This week, Minneapolis decided that was long enough.
On 25 June the city council voted 9 to 2 to repeal the 1988 ban that closed every adult bathhouse in the city at the height of the AIDS crisis. Supporters are not calling it a novelty. They are calling it a correction.
Why the ban existed
Rewind to 1988. Fear was running the show, treatments were nonexistent, and the council shut all three of the city’s bathhouses, hoping to slow the spread of HIV, as the Minnesota Star Tribune reported.
The emergency passed. The ban did not. Local advocates and several council members say what began as panic hardened into something closer to prejudice, a rule that sat on the books for decades after the science had moved on.
Honouring a man who didn’t live to see it
Jason Chavez, the council’s only out LGBTQIA+ member, co-wrote the two ordinances that undid the ban. Then he did something quietly devastating. He paid tribute to Brian Coyle, an out gay council member who voted for the 1988 ban and died of an AIDS-related illness three years later.
“I believe if Brian Coyle was here with us today, with everything we know about public health, he would be standing with us proudly,” Chavez said. He called the vote “the first step,” and promised “it will not be the last.”
What happens next
Nobody is unlocking the doors tomorrow. The repeal still needs a signature from Mayor Jacob Frey, who backs it, and the council has to write the rules these venues will run by.
Advocates are pointing to San Francisco as the template, where bathhouses operate with condoms on hand, trained staff, monitoring, showers and safe waste disposal. Pleasure and public health, under the same roof. That was always the point.
Not everyone cheered, though. One council member, whose ward hosts Minneapolis Pride, voted to keep the ban.
She said it was not a priority for the city, and that a longtime constituent had told her many gay men in his own network either oppose reopening or have real questions about it.
At DNA, we think that tension deserves saying out loud. This is one of the knottier debates in queer life, where history, health and freedom all tug in different directions at once. Minneapolis weighed all three and chose to open the doors.
After 38 years, you can understand the urge.
