As a result, at clubs like Eros, men have sex in one large room filled with bunk beds, where there are often as many gawkers - and gropers - as bedmates.
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Put off by the carnival atmosphere of today's sex clubs, some gay activists now would like to restore a bit of dignity to the process. They argue that the city's efforts to police safe-sex policies have outlived their usefulness, and are calling on Health Department officials to bring back the traditional bathhouses, and specifically the private rooms. “The public environment is not conducive to intimacy - it dehumanizes the sexual experience,” says Richard Carrazza, a sex club patron. “Treat people like animals, and they'll behave like animals.” Carrazza, 45, remembers the old bathhouses, and feels the privacy they afforded was a bit more “civilized.”Ĭarrazza and other activists, including members of ACT UP, have recently begun agitating for a return to the original bathhouse, protesting at public Health Department meetings and taking their argument directly to Mitch Katz, the city's openly gay health director. “That means being able to walk through and see whether or not people are having safe sex.” “In order to minimize new HIV cases, congregate sex businesses need to uphold safe-sex rules,” Katz says. The dispute is rekindling a long-simmering argument about how far the city should go in trying to compel safe sex among consenting gay men. When the bathhouses were first shut down in 1984, the closings prompted a contentious uproar among a divided gay community. “It was quite a nasty, visceral debate,” recalls Gustavo Suarez, spokesman for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, one of the city's oldest AIDS groups.