chapter
• • • • • • • • • • • •
Don’t Save Us from Our Sexuality
By 1984, when this essay first appeared, aids was coming to dominate gay male life in
the United States. The situation was particularly acute in San Francisco, which had the
heaviest concentration of diagnosed cases of any city in the nation. aids exacerbated the
tendency, discussed in the previous essay, to demonize gay male sexuality, a situation
complicated by the fact that the epidemic provoked some within the gay community to
call for government regulation of sexual expression. When proposals calling for the closure
of gay bathhouses began to circulate, Bérubé wrote this short piece in response. He used
an earlier epidemic of bubonic plague in San Francisco to reveal how, in the past, other
unpopular minorities — in this case, the Chinese immigrant community — were targets of
censure by public health authorities and became scapegoats for a disease.
Once called the “Gay Plague,” the aids epidemic continues to take its deadly
toll in the gay community. The mysterious disease exhausts doctors, baffles
researchers, challenges public health officials, divides the gay community,
panics the public, and tantalizes the Moral Majority. It triggers everyone’s
anxieties about the nitty-gritty of gay sex.
Such a climate breeds desperate attempts to find simple solutions. Stop
ab-1 [a gay rights bill in the California legislature], blame the victims, be-
come monogamous or celibate, close gay restaurants, pass new antisodomy
laws. This week, with the closing of all gay bathhouses and sex clubs immi-
nent, this process of aids scapegoating seems to have gotten out of control.
We are about to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Gay bathhouses and sex clubs aren’t the first institutions to be scapegoated
for the city’s inability to stop an epidemic. At the turn of the century, the San
Francisco Board of Health took extreme measures against the residents and
buildings of Chinatown during an outbreak of the bubonic plague.
By the late nineteenth century, one quarter of California’s nearly all-male
Chinese population, without work after building the railroads, had moved
Originally published in Coming Up!, April 1984, 11.
Turkish Bath ad from San Francisco phone book. Courtesy of the Allan Bérubé Collection
at the glbths, San Francisco.
to San Francisco’s Chinatown. There they re-created their unique culture
despite poverty and overcrowded living conditions. But racial discrimina-
tion, street attacks, anti-Chinese riots, and a movement for immigration
restrictions and deportations threatened their existence as a people and a
community.
From the time it was first established in 1870, the San Francisco Board of
Health considered Chinatown the main source of disease in San Francisco,
citing current medical theories to blame Chinatown’s “unwholesome odors”
for spreading sickness through the air, instead of ending the overcrowding
don’t save us from our sexuality : 63
and poverty forced on the residents by racial prejudice. This medical scape-
goating left the Chinese extremely vulnerable to a local health panic. On
May 6, 1900, the panic hit when the city’s first case of bubonic plague was
officially diagnosed in a Chinese male. The next day a rope and police guard
were placed around Chinatown to quarantine its residents. During the next
few months, health officials ordered every house in Chinatown disinfected,
and both Chinese and Japanese Californians were forbidden to leave the
state without federally issued medical certificates. Federal health officials
began plans to set up detention camps for San Francisco’s 14,000 Chinese
people at Angel Island, China Cove, and in a Mission Rock warehouse.
Under attack while its own people were dying, the Chinese community
fought for its survival. Faced with inadequate health care from the city, the
Chinese community opened and financed its own Tung Wah Dispensary.
Their lawyers took legal action against the quarantine measures and de-
tention camps and won in federal courts, angering public health officials.
When health inspectors began door-to-door searches, panicked residents
locked their doors, hid their sick in basements, and rioted in the streets.
Despite this resistance, health officials continued to scapegoat the Chi-
nese people in an effort to stop the epidemic. In the spring of 1903, the
state Board of Health recommended that Chinatown be razed to the ground
and saturated with chloride of lime and carbolic acid. Some buildings were
condemned and destroyed, but before the plan could be completed, the 1906
earthquake and fire had destroyed downtown San Francisco, including Chi-
natown. Of the 121 cases of plague recorded in the city during the epidemic,
118 died, almost all of them Chinese. As a result, bubonic plague became
known as “an Oriental disease, peculiar to rice-eaters.”
In 1907, a second outbreak of bubonic plague hit San Francisco; but this
time few victims were Chinese, and the Board of Health had scientific evi-
dence that rats and fleas, not the people and buildings of Chinatown, spread
the disease. A citywide campaign to rat-proof basements and alleys quickly
stopped the epidemic.
The gay community in 1984 is as vulnerable to health panics and scape-
goating as was the Chinese community in 1900. Both communities have
been forced into urban undergrounds and stigmatized as sources of disease.
Because most of its victims in the United States have so far been gay men,
aids, like the “Oriental disease, peculiar to rice-eaters,” has become stereo-
typed as a homosexual disease, peculiar to promiscuous bathhouse patrons.
Gay bathhouses have populated sexual landscapes of American cities
since at least the turn of the century. San Francisco’s first gay bathhouse
opened downtown fifty years ago near Third and Market. These institutions
64 : a community historian
have been remarkably resilient despite decades of harassment, entrapment,
arrests, raids, license challenges, arson, and physical attacks on patrons. Re-
cent attacks on bathhouses — like the mass arrests in Toronto in 1981 — have
been met with legal actions, angry demonstrations, and riots. Despite their
problems, gay bathhouses have been so strongly defended because they
have evolved into liberated zones where gay men — and more recently les-
bians — can go for a few hours and escape the sex fears of society. They are
unique, ever-changing erotic territories with their own rituals, folklore, lan-
guage, and traditions. It is their mere presence as erotic territory that trig-
gers the sex fears of gay and straight people alike and has made them one of
the most vulnerable and defended gay institutions.
Today gay men need our bathhouses more than ever, but as radically
changed institutions. Although there is no known cure for aids, it can
be prevented if gay men limit their sexual activities to what is now being
called “safe sex.” aids prevention thus requires a massive effort to change
gay men’s sexual behavior — not an easy task — through sex education, peer
support, and use of prophylactics (sailors used navy-issued condoms to fuck
each other on destroyers during World War II) and by creating places to go
for safe sex. Bathhouses are ideally suited for conversion to safe sex educa-
tion and play areas. Large numbers of gay men still go to the baths, and
many have sex nowhere else. Bathhouses provide showers, sex videos, fan-
tasy rooms, mirrors, expensive bondage equipment, flower arrangements,
lounges for talking, music — all the romantic and kinky elements that en-
hance safe sex practices with erotic fantasy but which many men cannot
afford — or dare to have put — in their own homes.
Bathhouse owners have been living in a never-never land, pretending that
aids and safe sex don’t exist. A few are to be praised for recently offering free
condoms, surgical scrub soap, individual lubricant packets, jack-off nights,
and safe sex literature and forums. These are important steps in the right
direction. Community groups and the health department should suggest
more changes, and a community watchdog committee should monitor the
baths to make sure these changes are put into effect immediately. Patrons
have the responsibility to learn what is safe, practice it with a vengeance,
teach each other, and come up with new ideas (like installing jack-off phone
booths at the baths to call from the comfort of your home). The conversion of
the bathhouses to safe sex play areas can become a model in aids prevention
for other cities and can serve as yet another example of how adaptive we can
be when we are fighting for our lives.
The closing of all gay bathhouses, on the other hand, will force casual sex
underground, may help spread aids, and will invite a wave of political repres-
don’t save us from our sexuality : 65
sion. When in 1956 state and local authorities put the heat on all lesbian and
gay bars, gay bathhouses, and cruising areas in San Francisco, patrons took
over straight bars, went to bars in San Mateo, Oakland, and San Jose, and
had huge parties in their homes. A prohibition on bathhouses and sex clubs
would similarly drive gay men into nearby cities, the parks, bathrooms, and
“sexual speakeasies” — illegal clubs subject to pay-offs, raids, arrests, poor
sanitary conditions, and underworld control. Gay men and women in their
fifties and older can describe to you in excruciating detail the nightmare
of fear, suspicion, health risks, and even suicide that is created in a sexual
underworld forced underground.
Closing the baths is dangerous in other ways, too. By focusing on the
sites of sexual activity instead of on actual sexual practices, it promotes the
illusion that romantic sex with one person in private is safe. In addition,
each time we beg the city to close one of our institutions, we place our whole
community in jeopardy, especially the vulnerable people and places on our
“sexual fringe.” We in San Francisco have achieved respect as a social and
political minority, but in much of the country gay men and women are still
called sex deviates, sex perverts, sex degenerates, and queers. Gay bars and
political groups in Mississippi and Oklahoma, for example, are considered
sexually and morally dangerous by public officials who would love to have
new reasons for making them illegal. If we in San Francisco ask the city
to close our baths and sex clubs, then a dangerous message will be heard
across the country: Gay men and women want to be saved from their own
sexuality.
Bathhouses have to change and change fast. But symbolic actions such as
closing the baths before we have even tried to transform them are danger-
ous and set the stage for a frightening scenario similar to that of Chinatown
eighty years ago. Scapegoating didn’t stop the plague then and it’s not likely
to stop aids now. But it will invite a wave of attacks on our communities.
Instead of wasting time defending our very right to exist, as Chinatown was
forced to do, we need to devote all our energy and resources, including bath-
houses and sex clubs, to the task of making the sexual changes that will save
our lives.
source
The source for the history of the San Francisco plague epidemic is Joan Traumer,
“The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco, 1870–1905,” California History,
Spring 1978.
66 : a community historian
