While gay sex clubs without private, locked rooms continued to operate in the city, most eventually closed their doors. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the lone gay bathhouse left in the Bay Area is Steamworks in the East Bay and it remains closed because of the health crisis.
Those regulations, when put into effect, resulted in a de facto ban on gay bathhouses in San Francisco, leaving residents to have to travel to such businesses in Berkeley and in San Jose. A legacy from the height of the AIDS epidemic, bathhouses in San Francisco until now could not have private rooms with locked doors and were required to monitor the sex of their patrons. The city's public health department has rescinded the restrictions that have kept such businesses from operating in the city since the mid-1980s. For the first time in nearly four decades operators of traditional gay bathhouses can once again seek permits to open in San Francisco.
