In San Francisco, America's gay capital, reopening bathhouses is a big thing. In fact, these are the only people I can imagine doing something like this. Oh yes, I can just imagine San Franciscans heading to the polls to vote on whether or not to reopen gay bathhouses. Today, however, some Bay gays are revisiting the issue and even trying to launch a ballot initiative to reopen the bathhouses. The bathhouses closed one by one either because they refused to adopt the guidelines or due to diminishing patronage. Bathhouse owners and activists balked at the guidelines. You can probably guess the rest of this story. Ultimately, by court order, the bathhouses were allowed to remain open, but were required to remove all private rooms and hire monitors (one for every twenty patrons) to ensure no unsafe sex acts were occurring and expel patrons engaging in unsafe sex practices. But because it was a local rather than state authority, about a half dozen bathhouses reopened shortly to challenge the regulation. That's because the San Francisco Department of Public Health issued an order closing the baths in October 1984 at the height of AIDS panic in the city, claiming they were a public nuisance facilitating multiple unsafe sexual contacts. Ironically, the same city that churns out so much gay porn and supports a number of commercial sex clubs has no gay public bathhouses.