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Letters to the Editor

Published Thursday, 22-Apr-2004 in issue 852

“[R]eading about the changing of ownership of ‘The Flame’ brought back many fond memories of Tuesday nights circa 1988.”

Dear Editor:

I’ve not lived in the San Diego area since 1995, and I’ve visited “The Flame” in at least 10 years, but reading about the changing of ownership of “The Flame” brought back many fond memories of Tuesday nights circa 1988. I wish Carla Coshow well in her future endeavors. I hope it remains a women’s (and men-friendly) space.

Carlos Chavarin

“Quite simply, the baths don’t spread AIDS …”

Dear Editor:

Congratulations on your editorial recommending that bath houses NOT be closed for supposed health reasons. It’s nice to have common sense injected into this debate.

Doctors first became aware of AIDS in 1981, twenty-three years ago, but only two cities in the United States (and none in Europe) put restrictions on bath houses.

So you would think that the AIDS transmission rate would have been sharply reduced in the cities that restricted baths (San Francisco and New York) while skyrocketing in cities that allowed baths to stay open. But that is not in fact what happened. The rates of AIDS relative to the gay populations of various cities stayed relatively constant.

And you have to wonder: If the baths “spread AIDS”, why has it taken cities like LA and San Diego twenty-three years to realize this? Maybe it has taken them this long, because the baths do NOT “spread AIDS,” or at least do not do so any more than the internet, bars, cafes and other places where gay men interested in casual sex meet.

It is not where you go, but what you do that causes HIV transmission. Yes, people have sex in bath houses, but they also have sex in other places. All the bath houses do is make having casual sex easier. But there is nothing to say that casual sex HAS to be unsafe sex. In a bath house, there are posters advising people about safer sex. You won’t find these on the internet or in a trick’s bedroom.

The people who want to close the baths are citing a CDC study that shows that patrons of bath houses in LA are seven times as likely to be HIV positive as “the population in general” (or so I understand). That’s like saying that gay nephew Bertie is more likely to be HIV positive than his spinster aunt Millie. So what? All this study proves is that people who go to bath houses are more likely to be HIV positive than people who don’t. It doesn't prove that people contract HIV at bath houses.

We should keep in mind that gay men did something extraordinary by taking it on themselves to practice safer sex in the early nineteen eighties, and the number of AIDS deaths among gay men dropped precipitously as a result. And this happened even though baths were open in most big American cities throughout the AIDS “pandemic.”

Now we’re seeing a relatively small increase in AIDS cases (compared to the holocaust that took place in the eighties) and some people are champing at the bit to close the baths. Sad to say, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the people urging closure are gay themselves.

There were gay activists who pushed closing the baths in San Francisco. They had the excuse of not really knowing that the baths do not spread AIDS. Twenty three years later, no one can use that excuse anymore. Quite simply, the baths don’t spread AIDS any more than other places where gay men meet – or else a lot more of us would be dead here in San Diego where the baths have been open all along.

I’d love to hear the explanation from a public health official who has “suddenly” decided that the baths need to be closed.

Andrew Towne

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