Gay bathhouses san francisco

Archimedes Banya

Archimedes Banya is a unique LGBTQ+-friendly bathhouse and spa located in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco.

You’ll feel like you stepped into the Four Seasons Spa."

The move to open a bathhouse comes five years after openly gay supervisor Rafael Mandelman first proposed rolling back the local ordinance that, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, outlawed gay bathhouses for both political and public health reasons.

“They’re a kind of community center.

“It’s a little hard, financially, to make these things work when the only way you’re able to make money is on the entry fee,” he said. “People are social. It features a range of amenities including saunas, steam rooms, a hot tub, and private rooms. Has not been good for civic life.

Patrons cruised dimly lit labyrinths of private rooms to a thumping disco soundtrack, with stops in the steam room, jacuzzi, and sauna. Steamworks in Berkeley is the closest actual queer bathhouse that's still in business.

But Born hopes to change that — and, interestingly, he identifies as straight, but has had plenty of gay friends over the years and knows a business opportunity when he sees one.

“The legislative process has been a little more involved than I had hoped or expected,” gay Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who spearheaded the effort beginning in 2019, told Gay Cities.

“I’ve been involved in San Francisco politics and queer community politics for a couple of decades, and all through that period, there were folks in the queer community, older folks who remembered the bathhouses and either felt that it had been a mistake to close them in the first place or felt that it was time to get them reopened.”

“Younger people who’d heard about the bathhouses couldn’t understand why San Francisco — uniquely apparently — how this very queer city doesn’t have these kinds of facilities,” Mandelman said.

With its central location and inclusive environment, Eros offers a comfortable space for LGBTQ+ individuals and visitors to unwind and connect.

Steamworks Baths

Steamworks Baths is a well-known LGBTQ+ sauna located in the SoMa (South of Market) neighborhood of San Francisco. I think we get a kind of stimulation from some of this online activity, including online-based sex apps, but it’s actually better to have more sustained community in person.

An image in San Francisco’s GLBT museum records gay men demonstrating at City Hall wearing only those short white towels; one protester holds up a sign reading, “Out of the Baths and into the Ovens!”

Onerous new regulations adopted in response to the epidemic led to the last of the baths closing in 1987.

Forty years later, after retroviral drugs and PrEP lifted the death sentence once associated with HIV, lawmakers and activists decided the time was right to bring the baths back to San Francisco.

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Gay bathhouse etiquette: Here’s what to expect

Never been to a gay bathhouse?

Has not been good for democracy. “You could travel in cities around the country and around the world and find bathhouses, but not in the gayest city in the world, San Francisco, and that seemed weird. That addition would be “beyond our local capacity,” he said, and require a regulatory change at the state level.

Mandelman’s predecessor as District 8 supervisor, gay state Sen.

Scott Weiner, could pick up the bathhouse baton and run it to Sacramento.

More important than extras like booze (or legal weed, for that matter) is simply getting people together, Mandelman said.

“I think our retreat into our personal spaces, our own homes, our own technology, has not been good for people. And there's definitely an untapped market on this side of the Bay among gay men who wouldn't venture to deepest Berkeley for that sort of thing.

Currently there's no timeline for when Maze SF might open, and city approvals for the project are still to come.