On June 25, the Minneapolis City Council voted 9-2 to repeal a 38-year-old ban on adult bathhouses — establishments originally shut down because men were dying of AIDS by the thousands. Mayor Jacob Frey signed the repeal three days later, on June 28, just in time for Twin Cities Pride weekend.
The original ban passed in 1988. It wasn't dreamed up by Bible-thumping conservatives. It was supported by gay council members who watched their friends get buried.
The ban's history is worth knowing, because the people who just killed it are pretending it doesn't exist. In 1979, Minneapolis police raided the Locker Room Baths in what became the largest adult bathhouse raid in U.S. history. By 1988, the AIDS epidemic had torn through the city's gay community so severely that the council — including Brian Coyle, a gay member who would himself die of AIDS-related illness — voted to shut the bathhouses down. The Locker Room, by then renamed the 315 Health Club, closed one day before the ban took effect. At its peak, Minneapolis had three such establishments. After 1988, it had zero.
Now the council has decided that was all a big overreaction.
Council member Jason Chavez, the body's only openly LGBTQ+ member, co-authored the repeal ordinances and framed the vote as a civil rights milestone. "What we do today will matter for the people who will come after us," Chavez said. "Pushing this activity into less visible spaces does not eliminate risk, it makes outreach and education harder." He then invoked the man who voted for the original ban: "I believe if Brian Coyle was here with us today, with everything we know about public health, he would be standing with us proudly."
That's a bold claim to make about a dead man who can't argue back.
The repeal's supporters leaned heavily on pharmaceutical advances. PrEP, the HIV-prevention drug, reduces transmission risk by roughly 99 percent when taken consistently. New HIV infections declined 76 percent between 1984 and 2022, according to KFF. Minneapolis declared itself a "fast track city" for HIV elimination in 2018, targeting a 90-90-90 goal by 2030 — 90 percent aware of their status, 90 percent on antiretroviral therapy, 90 percent achieving viral suppression.
All of which is real progress. None of which requires reopening commercial sex venues.
City Council President Elliott Payne seemed to acknowledge the vote was more symbolic than operational. "This is not the full body of work that we are aiming to do," Payne said. "This is the starting point for setting the foundation for regulatory framework." Translation: we voted to legalize something we haven't figured out how to regulate yet.
The two dissenting votes came from Council members Elizabeth Shaffer and Pearll Warren. Shaffer, who represents the Loring Park neighborhood, offered the most pointed objection — and notably, she framed it as coming from within the community the repeal claims to serve. "My constituent has spent decades in this fight," Shaffer said. "He shared with me that many gay men in his own network either oppose the return of bathhouses or have real questions about whether this is the right path."
Shaffer added a line that should have gotten more attention: "On the eve of Pride, this is a good reminder that the LGBTQ community is not a monolith."
Council Vice President Jamal Osman abstained. Council member Jamison Whiting, who had previously voiced support, was absent for the vote.
The coalition behind the push, the Safer Sex Spaces Coalition, was co-founded by policy aides Claire Kingstad and Ben Carrier. Kingstad acknowledged the awkward timing of a decades-old issue suddenly reaching the floor. "I understand that this is a complex issue, and it seemingly came out of nowhere," she said, "but for something that should have been revisited decades ago, there was never a right time."
Activist Patrick Scully was more direct about the movement's worldview. "I'm frustrated and angry that it took this long," he said, "but it just speaks to the sex negative, homo-hating world that we live in."
So the position is: a law passed to stop people from dying of a plague is evidence of hatred. The council members who voted for it — including the gay ones who were losing friends — were just bigots who didn't know any better.
Minneapolis follows San Francisco, which overturned its own AIDS-era ban in 2021 and created adult sex venue zoning legislation in 2022. Chicago never banned bathhouses at all.
The repeal changes city zoning, health and sanitation codes, and offense classifications. It removes what supporters called "stigmatizing language" from the health code. It does not immediately permit any bathhouse to open — the licensing framework still needs to be built. The council voted to legalize a category of business that does not yet have rules, inspections, or oversight.
A 38-year-old law existed because a community was dying and begged its government to act. That government acted. Now a new government has decided the dying was regrettable but the acting was the real problem.