Public health officials were also dealing with a late end-of-year surge in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations that has just now begun to recede. They had been granted an extension of the initial January 1 deadline to do so due to employees being out on vacation for the holidays. Health officials late last week informed Mandelman's office that they had updated the rules governing adult sex venues. Mandelman, who represents the Castro, spearheaded rescinding the outdated sex venue rules last year. Whether it is significant on the ground depends on if entrepreneurs with the vision and financial capacities and the savvy to open can and operate one of these," said gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman of the lifting of the old bathhouse rules. "It is symbolically significant right now.
There is just one in operation today: Eros on upper Market Street in the city's LGBTQ Castro district. While gay sex clubs without private, locked rooms continued to operate in the city, most eventually closed their doors. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the lone gay bathhouse left in the Bay Area is Steamworks in the East Bay and it remains closed because of the health crisis. Those regulations, when put into effect, resulted in a de facto ban on gay bathhouses in San Francisco, leaving residents to have to travel to such businesses in Berkeley and in San Jose. A legacy from the height of the AIDS epidemic, bathhouses in San Francisco until now could not have private rooms with locked doors and were required to monitor the sex of their patrons.
The city's public health department has rescinded the restrictions that have kept such businesses from operating in the city since the mid-1980s. For the first time in nearly four decades operators of traditional gay bathhouses can once again seek permits to open in San Francisco.