AIDS Commission Backs Proposal to Shut Down Bathhouses

Despite heated opposition from bathhouse owners and the threat of a legal challenge, the Los Angeles County AIDS Commission backed a recommendation Friday to shut down local bathhouses as a precaution against the spread of the AIDS virus.

The proposal, which still must be approved by the Board of Supervisors, calls for the permanent closure of bathhouses as a public health risk that allows high-risk sexual practices that can transmit the acquired immune deficiency syndrome virus.

“I know that those people who wish to participate in those kinds of sexual activities will go elsewhere, but I think that what we have done is effectively defuse a place of great potential harm,” said Rabbi Allen Freehling, chairman of the AIDS Commission.

Freehling said he expects county supervisors to go along with the commission’s recommendation, but he conceded that there is likely to be “another major court battle” over efforts to close the county’s 16 bathhouses.

“How the courts will act, I don’t know. I don’t know if the county can find that legal hook which will allow the bathhouses to be closed,” Freehling said after the vote.

Fifteen commission members voted unanimously for the closure proposal with four abstentions, and the issue was immediately placed on Tuesday’s agenda of the Board of Supervisors.

Two years ago, the board adopted regulations aimed at discouraging the spread of the AIDS virus by requiring bathhouses to eliminate private rooms and ban high-risk forms of sexual contact.

But Superior Court Judge John L. Cole refused to enforce the regulations, noting that some of the county health department’s own doctors did not agree with the county’s definition of what constituted “unsafe” sex practices to be banned under the regulations.

Some of those same arguments were raised again Friday by opponents of the proposal.

Sonny King, a founder of the AIDS Positive Action League, told commissioners that their recommendation “makes about as much sense as the use of decapitation in order to prevent the further spread of dandruff.”

“It just won’t work,” he said. “It can only serve to drive further underground the very people which we are trying to educate (about AIDS).”

Barrett S. Litt, an attorney for several owners, argued that closing the bathhouses would only force more men to seek unsafe sex in public parks, restrooms and gay bars, which would worsen, rather than curb, the AIDS epidemic.

“You are making the decision to deprive them of their right to attend bathhouses without any evidence that the effect of that will be to stop or impact in any significant way the spread of AIDS,” Litt said.

But Gary Fowler, who chaired the commission’s special task force, said the risk that an AIDS virus carrier will continue to expose others by frequenting bathhouses and engaging in unsafe sex is enough of a concern to warrant closing down local bathhouses.

In San Francisco, where the last gay bathhouse closed its doors last year, local officials attempted to legislate them out of existence. But a judge blocked those efforts by allowing clubs and bathhouses to remain open if they monitored their patrons and ejected anyone who engaged in activities that could spread the AIDS virus.

However, several bathhouses closed rather than monitor patrons. And others closed when their patronage dropped.

There were 4,069 AIDS cases reported in the Los Angeles metropolitan area in 1987.