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From Bay Area Reporter:
Coronavirus outbreak postpones hearing on SF bathhouse policy
by Matthew S. Bajko, Assistant Editor
Tuesday Mar 10, 2020A Thursday hearing to discuss a policy change to allow bathhouses like Steamworks in Berkeley in San Francisco has been canceled due to the coronavirus outbreak.
The first hearing on allowing gay bathhouses to reopen in San Francisco has been postponed in light of the coronavirus outbreak.
… In light of coronavirus developments, Board of Supervisors President Norman Yee over the weekend asked his colleagues to postpone their legislative proposals likely to draw a large contingent of the public to speak on the matter at City Hall hearings.
Thus, gay District 8 Supervisor Rafael Mandelman made the decision to postpone the planned hearing for Thursday, March 12, on his ordinance aimed at updating the city’s policies regarding private rooms in adult sex venues. …
So far the Bay Area’s two gay bathhouses, the Watergarden in San Jose and Steamworks in Berkeley, remain open and have not shut down due to the coronavirus. Both are operating on their usual 24-hours a day, seven days a week schedule. …
San Francisco’s bathhouse restrictions were instituted in 1984 during the height of the AIDS epidemic in response to a lawsuit the city had filed and resulted in the businesses shutting their doors. That October a San Francisco Superior Court judge issued a temporary restraining order that shuttered nine gay bathhouses and sex clubs.
In late November of that year another judge lifted the restraining order but imposed new rules on how the bathhouses and sex clubs could operate. No longer could they rent private rooms, unless they secured a hotel license, and employees had to monitor the sexual behavior of patrons. …
The legal case came to an end in 1989 when the city dismissed its lawsuit. By then the city’s gay bathhouses were no more, but over the ensuing years sex clubs opened their doors. Several, like Eros and Blow Buddies, remain in business, albeit without private rooms patrons can lock shut.
By the 1990s the city’s health officials saw the sex clubs as avenues to reach gay men and educate them about safe sex practices. But they had remained resolute in their opposition to allowing gay bathhouses to open with private rooms.
In light of such advancements in HIV prevention like PrEP, the once-a-day pill that prevents the transmission of HIV, and people living with HIV with undetectable HIV viral loads unlikely to transmit the virus to their sexual partners, city health officials this year for the first time told the B.A.R. they would not object to seeing gay bathhouses reopen with private rooms. …
Initially, Mandelman had included language instructing DPH officials to revise the city’s bathhouse rules by June 1. But in light of the health department’s focus on dealing with the coronavirus outbreak, that deadline had been pushed back to July 1.
Well, that was big of him.
Public reaction to the proposal has been “overwhelmingly positive,” noted Mandelman, who expects it will be adopted. …”With regard to this latest delay in the hearing, people have been waiting for decades to see the bathhouse policies changed, so having to wait another month is unfortunate but probably necessary.”
Granted, this article is slightly demented. Yet, in some ways, it is saner than most mentions of AIDS in recent years in the mainstream media, where AIDS has been retconned into being due to homophobia, especially Ronald Reagan’s homophobia (or, if a gay man is writing the article, Nancy Reagan’s homophobia). In reality, of course, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s was more or less a direct side effect of the triumph of Gay Liberation in the 1970s. But you aren’t supposed to mention that in the MSM.
It will be interesting to see how the history of the new viral epidemic will be rewritten in the years to come to flatter the powerful.
No surprise to iSteve readers, but there really is something different about gay men and sexual behavior. Maybe at the time uncle was young and didn't know any better, but it was a known thing. I just don't believe that a bunch of queers didn't know that this would disproportionately affect them, but they took the risk anyway.
AIDS worked wonders for the makers of the Ayds diet chocolates … can’t wait to see what this does for Corona.
Gay culture had no trouble acknowledging it, at the time.
Ok, that was a good pun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J2OlIpQgF8Replies: @Achmed E. Newman
I wonder if the Pet Shop Boys will be invited to speak at the hearing.
I think if you attend gay bathhouses, some measly coronavirus will be the least of your concerns.
BTW, and no slur on our host, but if I were to open a gay bathhouse, I’d name it “Adam & Steve’s”. It’s up for the taking, as I have no further plans…
Still, Patton gets credit for his "poor dumb bastard" line, even though that was a common grunt joke in the previous war.
“Both are operating on their usual 24-hours a day, seven days a week schedule. …” Can these guys EVER give it a break for a couple of hours?
You need to update the stupidity graph on your website, it says we reached peak stupidity in 2015 when in fact the stupidity levels are still rising.
http://redefininggod.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ayds.jpg
https://produits.bienmanger.com/34491-0w600h600_Corona_Extra_Mexican_Blonde_Beer.jpgReplies: @Steve Sailer, @CAL2, @J.Ross
The Kirkland, WA old folks home doesn’t seem to be causing problems for Costco’s private label Kirkland brand.
Got to save it for the next panic pandemic crisis in that Big Bro doesn't have the most imaginative sloganeers working for him whipping up the frenzy.
http://redefininggod.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ayds.jpg
https://produits.bienmanger.com/34491-0w600h600_Corona_Extra_Mexican_Blonde_Beer.jpgReplies: @Steve Sailer, @CAL2, @J.Ross
Corona needs to run ads calling the virus the Wuhan Flu.
Homosexuality is the vector for venereal disease. In 2014, homosexuals accounted for 83% of syphilis cases in the US, despite being ~2% of the population: cdc.gov/STD
Maybe they could close on Sunday mornings so everybody can go to church.
You are quite right, JPT. I and one of the commenters just discussed that a week or two back. Yeah, I was expecting the peak a lot sooner. I need to just get that nice old font I used and make a new one.
Thank you for reading.
You’re right, it wasn’t caused by Reagan:
Actually it was a pathogen.
The AIDS crisis was caused by gay liberation allowing some gays to engage in indiscriminate, unsafe sex with numerous partners thereby spreading this pathogen to a larger number of victims.
If women were as inherently sexually indiscriminate as gay or straight men, in terms of how many people they would have uncommitted sex with and anal sex, straight people would also have suffered an AIDS crisis. There is no straight equivalent of the gay bathhouse because the number of women who would go into such a place and have sexual contact with a dozen strangers a night is statistically insignificant. Once the authorities could no longer raid gay bath houses and night clubs and those places could operate freely, not only HIV but other venereal disease pathogens took off.Replies: @ben tillman
Bug 1 — Buggers 0
Because gay men are more successful, on frustrated str8 guys dreams. All men want a lot of sex with variety. But usually only gay guys are successful on this.
No goy, you don`t understand, it`s success!
You sodomite enablers will hang right next to them.
Gay sexuality means there’s no one to say no.
A pathogen with a highly idiosyncratic, behavioral vector.
>felching
No goy, you don`t understand, it`s success!
You sodomite enablers will hang right next to them.
That joke was old by 1980.
Still, Patton gets credit for his “poor dumb bastard” line, even though that was a common grunt joke in the previous war.
There’s no one to say “no”.
The disease AIDS is caused by a pathogen.
The AIDS crisis was caused by gay liberation allowing some gays to engage in indiscriminate, unsafe sex with numerous partners thereby spreading this pathogen to a larger number of victims.
If women were as inherently sexually indiscriminate as gay or straight men, in terms of how many people they would have uncommitted sex with and anal sex, straight people would also have suffered an AIDS crisis. There is no straight equivalent of the gay bathhouse because the number of women who would go into such a place and have sexual contact with a dozen strangers a night is statistically insignificant. Once the authorities could no longer raid gay bath houses and night clubs and those places could operate freely, not only HIV but other venereal disease pathogens took off.
The subject of actual gay sex practices are usually scrubbed from public discourse since most people would find themselves feeling a bit ill if given a full picture in detail. People don’t want to think about it. It’s interesting how the mind works in this regard, blotting out thoughts about how the recent presidential candidate, for example, might be cavorting in private with his “husband” as a “wife” or what goes on in these gay sex clubs. One might think twice about shaking their hand.
Warning, you may have seen it already, and it's disgusting. Reading the whole article is necessary to grasp the entitlement detached from reality.
https://archive.fo/oHvXF
Berkeley and San Jose have gay bathhouses now?
WTF?
One more thing you do not want your computer and the NSA to know you googled for.
San Jose and Berkeley serve as the Newark and Bridgeport of sodomy.Replies: @Art Deco
It’s being actively rewritten right now to flatter our Chinese overlords.
The gyroscope returns to its equilibrium.
Straight women who sleep around are called whores and the idea of straight normal sexual relations between men and women are frowned upon while abnormal relations are called progressive and surrounded by rainbows and unicorns; why it’s all a gay life c’mon in besides there is no where else you would be accepted if you were a straight woman. Almost every person that would call a woman a whore would say that that bath house is their right and it’s progressive and good and your just homophobic. Then they would go on to teach that junk to your kids and that doesn’t wipe out the population because they can adopt Jewish kids from Russia.
http://redefininggod.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/ayds.jpg
https://produits.bienmanger.com/34491-0w600h600_Corona_Extra_Mexican_Blonde_Beer.jpgReplies: @Steve Sailer, @CAL2, @J.Ross
Probably nothing. The only time people choose Corona is because of their extensive advertising projects. Corona’s brand identity is as a floor-scrapingly cheap beer for people who don’t care about quality — the Keystone Light of Mexico — so they’re probably crisis-proof.
Corona soon became an“imported” beer and sat next to Heineken on the shelf and shared it’s price point. It was an upscale beer for yuppies and parrotheads who daydreamed of snorkeling in Eleuthera while toiling in their cubicle farms. The brand identity was, “ the beer that you squeeze a lime into.”
The Corona cachet has diminished but it still seems to be everywhere. After Bud Light, it is the second- most popular brand among litterers in Los Angeles.
If you want to know if the brand will be damaged by the Corona Virus, ask a Mexican. I hear Gustavo Arellano is available.Replies: @J.Ross
The thing exists but there’s no need for it to. Gays were deliberately overloading their immune systems to the point of collapse (some still do this, by the way). What’s the distinction between a homosexual who dies from a preventable disease after deliberately totally destroying his immune system, and one who dies “from” AIDS? An academic and microscopic one, and a meaningless one from the health standpoint because controlling promiscuity also controls the disease more completely than does hand washing with flu, and the long hoped-for drugs with the continued promiscuity are meaningless. In other words all the gay activist noise of the 80s and 90s was just a deeply perverse attempt to be pharmacologically allowed to continue doing the wrong thing. And likewise witness Democrat resistence to quarantine and closing borders.
What an all star cast!
They do like to blame Reagan (who, in fairness, deserves some blame) but gay sex habits come in for a fair amount of blame in two of the big AIDS movies I’ve seen – “And the Band Played On” (where rock star Phil Collins plays a bath house owner, iirc) and “The Normal Heart.” The latter, which stars Mark Ruffalo and Jim Parsons, is especially honest about the contributions of gay promiscuity to the epidemic. At one point Ruffalo, who is the stand-in for Larry Kramer, walks past 4-5 men having a public orgy on Fire Island.
Other, more popular movies, like Tom Hanks’s “Philadelphia,” make it look as though AIDS was just a disease picked up mostly by chaste men who just “slipped up” once or twice.
He doesn't. Neither does Mayor Koch.
"Butter wouldn't melt in his bottom"
Oh Irony! Mexico frets about U.S. coronavirus spread, could restrict border
https://news.trust.org/item/20200313151928-n3bce
How a mysteriously arranged chain of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen atoms (mostly) can do what 320 million humans can’t. Jose and Maria will stay away automatically when the grandpa’s and grandma’s have to fight for the ventilators.
Careful, we don’t want to get any rumours started.
Got to save it for the next panic pandemic crisis in that Big Bro doesn’t have the most imaginative sloganeers working for him whipping up the frenzy.
If a lot of women want to have sex with you, would you say “No!Because it’st promiscuity” ? LOL
In the serie Looking, about the life of several gay friends in SF, you saw a bathhouse scene, even if the young people didn’t cruise outdoor any more (they go to a place as a museum like expedition). But it seems there were locker room. Maybe it was not in SF city. So I suppose the SF one have orgy instead ….
I think young gay, as straights, can meet for free on dating apps wich allow to select on a variety of physical. mental and social traits. And mailing list allow them to organise more selective private parties as you see in the movie Looking. The main characters are invited in a private party with only white muscular professional gays and one of them feel uncomfortable because he thinks the party is KKK like.
Other, more popular movies, like Tom Hanks’s “Philadelphia,” make it look as though AIDS was just a disease picked up mostly by chaste men who just “slipped up” once or twice.Replies: @Art Deco, @Sue D. Nim
They do like to blame Reagan (who, in fairness, deserves some blame)
He doesn’t. Neither does Mayor Koch.
Milton Berle spoke of attending a service at a gay church. He thought it unusual that only half the congregation was kneeling.
The AIDS crisis was caused by gay liberation allowing some gays to engage in indiscriminate, unsafe sex with numerous partners thereby spreading this pathogen to a larger number of victims.
If women were as inherently sexually indiscriminate as gay or straight men, in terms of how many people they would have uncommitted sex with and anal sex, straight people would also have suffered an AIDS crisis. There is no straight equivalent of the gay bathhouse because the number of women who would go into such a place and have sexual contact with a dozen strangers a night is statistically insignificant. Once the authorities could no longer raid gay bath houses and night clubs and those places could operate freely, not only HIV but other venereal disease pathogens took off.Replies: @ben tillman
Just a pathogen? Or is more required?
Probably not, because transmission of HIV from woman to man is so difficult.
This is a nonsensical objection because women physically and in practice cannot be as promiscuous as men to the same totality that mini-lop rabbits in any strength cannot hunt orcas for food. The numbers are just incomparable because men are different from women. The hypothetical is one I can only barely speak to, but the wisdom and normality of my reaction to the one case where a drunk barracks ho was harrissing me late at night is confirmed by the statements of manlier and more active men: yes, men do reject women who look like they’re probably going to give you something, and sexual experience and confidence only increases the willingness to say no. Bugchasers, homosexuals of the most self-destructive type, are not an analog to heterosexuals, they are an analog to suicides. Their behavior is not sexuality, it is a deliberate embrace of self-destruction.
Read the famous article "Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers" by Clark & Hatfield.
The abstract :
According to cultural stereotypes, men are more eager for sex than are women; women are more likely to set limits on such activity. In this paper, we review the work of theorists who have argued in favor of this proposition and review the interview and correlational data which support this contention. Finally, we report two experimental tests of ihis hypothesis. In these experiments, conducted in 1978 and 1982, male and female confederates of average attractiveness approached potential partners with one of three requests: "Would you go out tonight?" "Will you come over to my apartment?" or "Would you go to bed with me?" The great majority of men were willing to have a sexual liaison with the women who approached them. Women were not. Not one woman agreed to a sexual liaison. Many possible reasons for this marked gender difference were discussed. These studies were run in 1978 and 1982. It has since become important to track how the threat of AIDS is affecting men and women's willingness to date, come to an apartment, or to engage in casual sexual relations.
There’s an unmentionably obscene but laugh out loud hilarious article I posted a long time ago, the headline is like a South Park joke, and the article climaxes with a homosexual lecturing a doctor about how little the irresponsible know-nothings in white lab coats are doing to accommodate the deliberate re-infection of one hundred percent preventable illness.
Warning, you may have seen it already, and it’s disgusting. Reading the whole article is necessary to grasp the entitlement detached from reality.
https://archive.fo/oHvXF
In Africa HIV transmission is overwhelmly by heterosexual sex.
2. Things are different here in relevant respects.
WTF?
One more thing you do not want your computer and the NSA to know you googled for.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
I think Steve himself pointed out how the (very effective) Giuliani-Bloomberg crackdown in NYC merely shifted the crime to Newark and Bridgeport.
Most cities either combat vice, or ignore it. Progressive cities like Hamburg and San Francisco attempt to regulate it. Read about the “Brian Coyle ordinance” in that MiniFrisco-of-the-Midwest Minneapolis:
There’s a Battle Brewing That Would Bring Gay Bathhouses Back to Minneapolis
San Jose and Berkeley serve as the Newark and Bridgeport of sodomy.
Yeah, pretty much.
Very perceptive of you to note that gay journalists tended to focus more on Nancy than on Ron.
I didn’t realize that “sex clubs” are now open again. I would prefer that sex clubs and bath houses didn’t exist and not just due to the AIDS angle.
I am trying to think of other places that are legal and open to the public that exist just so people can engage in risky behavior of various types all at once: drinking, drug taking, sex (unprotected if you choose). Except for legal brothels in Nevada nothing else is coming to mind. I think if this was something that women wanted to do it would not be allowed.
I see in this article about San Francisco that in 2018 they had fewer than 200 new cases of AIDS and that they have a goal of reaching 0. Having bath houses won’t help that goal, it seems to me. Also according to the CDC only about half of AIDS patients “were virally suppressed” and only 64% “received some HIV care.”
https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/overview/ataglance.html
Here’s another reason this might be going on:
https://ebar.com/news/news/287809
Gays have made a big deal through the years of saying that they are no different than the rest of us. I actually think that’s mostly true. Still, to me, wanting bath houses around again shows that they are different from me. Not the world’s best PR move.
Re-posting an apropos recent past comment of mine. (No time to do more; apologies.)
——
Reminds me of a post by dissident homosexual blogger Rob “Throbert” McGee in which he laments “a “mainstream gay culture” which holds that stigmatizing bad behavior is a sin far worse than the bad behavior itself could be.” ( Voices from “The Gay AIDS Industry”, August 2009)
In a different post (http://throbert.blogspot.com/2009/07/email-i-sent-this-morning-to-my-hateful.html ], McGee pointed-out that,
but that,
McGee promoted FROT, the vastly safer, cleaner, non-brutal, non-penetrative, fully-egalitarian, completely pain-free alternative to anal buggery that the redoubtable Bill Weintraub contends is the truest and ultimate form of male homoerotic intercourse. As emphatically pro-homoerotic as he is anti-buggery, Weintraub for many years described himself as a “gay activist” before eventually going-on to reject such labels as “gay” entirely.
Note that highly graphic content abounds at Weintraub’s Man2man Alliance website. McGee’s claim, just under where he links to said site, that it is “a more work-friendly version of Weintraub’s site with no penis photos!” has not been true for at least a decade-plus now.
For the record, my own position on the strain of homoeroticsm that is promoted at the Man2Man Alliance site can be summarized as follows. While vastly preferable to the prevailing one of abject degeneracy from which they dissent, there is simply no equivalent to the monogamous, tempered, wholesome heterosexuality that is centered around traditional marriage. For anyone unable or unwilling to remain with such confines, celibacy is the next-best ideal.
Corona was cheap Mexican beer popularized by surfers who brought it back from Baja, or so legend has it.
Corona soon became an“imported” beer and sat next to Heineken on the shelf and shared it’s price point. It was an upscale beer for yuppies and parrotheads who daydreamed of snorkeling in Eleuthera while toiling in their cubicle farms. The brand identity was, “ the beer that you squeeze a lime into.”
The Corona cachet has diminished but it still seems to be everywhere. After Bud Light, it is the second- most popular brand among litterers in Los Angeles.
If you want to know if the brand will be damaged by the Corona Virus, ask a Mexican. I hear Gustavo Arellano is available.
San Jose and Berkeley serve as the Newark and Bridgeport of sodomy.Replies: @Art Deco
I think Steve himself pointed out how the (very effective) Giuliani-Bloomberg crackdown in NYC merely shifted the crime to Newark and Bridgeport.
He didn’t point that out, because it isn’t true. New York City has a population of 8 million. The 82% reduction in the homicide rate therein there wasn’t manifest in a corresponding increase in other jurisdictions in the commuter belt. It certainly was not manifest in Newark and Bridgeport. Those two municipalities have a combined population of 430,000. Newark’s current homicide rate bounces around 30 per 100,000, about 10% higher than New York City’s rate in 1990. The rate in Bridgeport is currently around 8 per 100,000, 70% lower than the rate in New York City in 1990. (Newark, by the way, is the most crime prone jurisdiction in the 19 counties around New York City. None of New York City’s police precincts is as unsafe as Newark).
So the math could work for bathhouses.
Okay, but San Jose is larger than San Francisco. Berkeley is small (by California standards), but combined with next-door Oakland is about 2/3, and is less scary.
So the math could work for bathhouses.
Other, more popular movies, like Tom Hanks’s “Philadelphia,” make it look as though AIDS was just a disease picked up mostly by chaste men who just “slipped up” once or twice.Replies: @Art Deco, @Sue D. Nim
I remember a great line from a Mark Steyn review of Philadelphia re Tom Hanks’ character:
“Butter wouldn’t melt in his bottom”
Corona soon became an“imported” beer and sat next to Heineken on the shelf and shared it’s price point. It was an upscale beer for yuppies and parrotheads who daydreamed of snorkeling in Eleuthera while toiling in their cubicle farms. The brand identity was, “ the beer that you squeeze a lime into.”
The Corona cachet has diminished but it still seems to be everywhere. After Bud Light, it is the second- most popular brand among litterers in Los Angeles.
If you want to know if the brand will be damaged by the Corona Virus, ask a Mexican. I hear Gustavo Arellano is available.Replies: @J.Ross
If I as a huero asked a Mexican about Corona (or Taco Bell, or Paulina Rubio, or Ricky Martin, or La Cucaracha) he would be in his rights to knife me, and I would accept his knife. The one thing dumber would be to ask a Puerto Rican.
Normal men are much more prone to promiscuity than women. The difference between homo and heterosexuals, is that homosexuals have easier access to sex.
Read the famous article “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers” by Clark & Hatfield.
The abstract :
According to cultural stereotypes, men are more eager for sex than are women; women are more likely to set limits on such activity. In this paper, we review the work of theorists who have argued in favor of this proposition and review the interview and correlational data which support this contention. Finally, we report two experimental tests of ihis hypothesis. In these experiments, conducted in 1978 and 1982, male and female confederates of average attractiveness approached potential partners with one of three requests: “Would you go out tonight?” “Will you come over to my apartment?” or “Would you go to bed with me?” The great majority of men were willing to have a sexual liaison with the women who approached them. Women were not. Not one woman agreed to a sexual liaison. Many possible reasons for this marked gender difference were discussed. These studies were run in 1978 and 1982. It has since become important to track how the threat of AIDS is affecting men and women’s willingness to date, come to an apartment, or to engage in casual sexual relations.
1. Prove it.
2. Things are different here in relevant respects.
My gay uncle and his buds probably saw this movie. The four of them were outliers in a small town in that gays are 2 to maybe 3 percent of the population (small high school class, obviously). All four hopped in a car, drove from Texas to San Fran and did the #$#$y #$#$#y. He and his buddies graduated in 83 or so, and he was the last of the group to die of aids in 91.
No surprise to iSteve readers, but there really is something different about gay men and sexual behavior. Maybe at the time uncle was young and didn’t know any better, but it was a known thing. I just don’t believe that a bunch of queers didn’t know that this would disproportionately affect them, but they took the risk anyway.