Could Minneapolis welcome bathhouses back for the first time since the late 1980s?

The Minneapolis City Council this week voted unanimously to direct staff to explore repealing the city’s 38-year ban on adult sex venues, opening the door to the possible return of bathhouses that once served as important social and sexual gathering spaces for gay men. But the 12-0 vote does not mean the Democrat-dominated council is united on whether such venues should ultimately reopen, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.

The Safer Sex Spaces Coalition has spent years pressing Minneapolis to overturn the 1988 ordinance, enacted at the height of the AIDS crisis, that outlawed commercial spaces facilitating consensual sexual activity.

“Our mission is repealing the outdated and ineffective local laws (ordinances) that made facilitating sexual conduct in commercial spaces illegal and modernizing the code to allow for safer sex spaces,” the coalition says on its website. “We have met with City Council members, city staff, and public health experts to discuss legalizing sexual activity in commercial spaces.”

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Still, some council members remain skeptical. While there appears to be broad support for stripping outdated and stigmatizing language from the municipal code, several officials questioned whether lifting the ban is necessary.

“What problem are we trying to solve?” said City Council Member Linea Palmisano. “Why is this necessary?”

Like many major metropolitan areas, Minneapolis enacted its ban during the panic-driven early years of the HIV epidemic, when gay sexual spaces were often targeted under the guise of public health. Advocates say those policies pushed queer community life underground rather than making it safer. In recent years, other cities have revisited similar restrictions. San Francisco repealed its own decades-old bathhouse ban in 2021, embracing a broader shift away from punitive HIV-era policymaking.

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Minneapolis has already begun revising some of that legacy language. In 2024, the city updated ordinances that still described HIV as an “irreversible and uniformly fatal” condition. Officials are now also considering zoning and sanitation code changes that would remove stigmatizing terminology and modernize definitions of so-called high-risk sexual conduct. The council is also studying a licensing framework similar to the one used in neighboring St. Paul.

Minneapolis City Council Member Jason Chavez, one of the council’s out LGBTQ+ members, said repeal would mark an important symbolic and practical step forward.

"LGBTQIA+ gathering spaces, including bathhouses, have long been targeted by criminalization and policing, and our communities have paid a devastating price for that,” Chavez said, according to CBS News.