About 2,500 men visit the city’s four bathhouses each week, according to a health department memo.
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By TRENTON STRAUBE
Friday, January 11, 2008
Are bathhouses about to go the way of the eight-track? A leaked memo revealed that the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been re-evaluating how it deals with the gay bathhouses and sex venues. The document outlines four policy options in regulating the businesses. They range from shuttering all commercial sex establishments to allowing clubs to operate as a means of promoting safer sex. It does not make any recommendations.
A local alliance of health professionals, activists and club owners has been drafting a paper that outlines which policy it supports. The group, called The Commercial Sex Venues Coalition, plans to give the paper and brief to health commissioner Thomas Frieden by Friday, Jan. 11.
“We absolutely don’t want to see the city close down any more sex clubs,” said Sean Cahill, the managing director for Public Policy Research and Community Health at Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which is a member of the coalition.
Though Cahill noted the city had already closed down several clubs—The Wall Street Sauna, and El Mirage, for example—he concedes that the memo doesn’t propose further closures. (According to the health department, “only four” bathhouses remain in operation, though the number of other sex venues, such as private parties, is unknown.)
“We hope this is the beginning of a conversation with the commissioner,” Cahill said. “We’re going in this with an open mind. I think we all have same goals: decreasing HIV and other STDS.”
A health department spokesperson clarified that the leaked document was intended only to provide background about DOHMH’s current policy, compare other cities’ policies and evaluate the city’s options.
The city’s current policy is stated in the memo as such: “No establishment shall make facilities available for the purpose of sexual activities where anal intercourse, vaginal intercourse or fellatio take place. Such facilities shall constitute a threat to the public health.” (An establishment is defined as “any place in which entry, membership, goods or services are purchased”)
Compared with the other cities studied in the memo, only New York City prohibits sex in public spaces of sex venues. Other cities prohibit sex in private areas; the rational is that patrons who have sex in public can be monitored by the venue and men who play unsafe can be reprimanded. In New York, health inspectors do not enter private rooms or sex parties.
The four options outlined in the memo include:
1. Close venues that allow sex to take place in public, but continue to allow bathhouses to operate.
2. Attempt to enforce the bathhouse policy (no pubic sex; no investigation of private rooms) for more private venues.
3. Attempt to close all community sex venues (which, the memo’s author notes, would outrage activists and be challenged in court).
4 Modify the Sanitary Code to allow bathhouses and sex parties as long as safe sex is promoted and sex in private areas is forbidden.
GMHC’s Cahill said the The Commercial Sex Venues Coalition supports No. 4. “Not having a private room would help us regulate unsafe sex,” he said.
Other health experts disagree with completely shuttering private rooms. “Not everyone is comfortable having sexual encounters in open spaces like that,” said David Nassry, DMD, who has done HIV outreach work through New York University and Callen Lorde. He questions how changing the code would affect people who don’t want to have sex in front of other people.
Such as change could force more patrons to seek sex online and further underground.
Though some rapid HIV testing is available at bathhouses, Nassry advocates for more. “Test, test, test—it’s simple, it’s cheap and it’s fast,” he said. “People who are aware of their status are less likely to engage in ‘risky behaviors.’ This is fact. Twenty-five percent of people who have HIV are not aware of their status.”
HIV and Sex Statistics
Thomas Farely, special advisor to the health commissioner, wrote the memo to Frieden. It was dated Nov. 14, 2007, and titled “Policy Regarding Bathhouses and Other Commercial Sex Venues in New York City.” The internal document, posted online this week by Gay City News and made available to various sources, also includes background information and summaries on the city’s current policy regarding bathhouses. It lists data on current sex venues in the city (although there are “only four” bathhouses, 2,500 patrons visit them per week; the memo quotes HX magazine as listing 48 private sex parties).
In the memo, Farley writes to commissioner Thomas Friedman: “New York City is now experiencing an increase in syphilis and an increase in HIV infection in men who have sex with men. In view of this increase it is appropriate to re-evaluate New York’s current policies regarding commercial sex venues to see if policy changes could reduce the spread of these infections.”
This quote has lead to confusion about local HIV statistics, which on a whole are decreasing. To clarify: HIV rates in the New York City have increased 33 percent among men younger than 30 who have sex with men, from 374 in 2001 to 499 in 2006 according to a DOHMH report from September 2007. In MSM younger than 20, African-American and Hispanic males accounted for 81 out of the 87 cases.
However, in MSM 30 or older, new diagnoses declined 22 percent. Overall, new diagnoses among all MSM in the city dropped 4.9 percent from 1,203 in 2001 to 1,144 in 2006.
Regarding the syphilis numbers: The health department reported 260 cases in the first quarter of 2007, double the amount the previous first quarter. Of those cases, 96 percent were among mostly MSM.
Some interesting numbers appear in the health department memo. Farley writes that “Bathhouses attract high-risk clients. The HIV prevalence among bathhouse users ranges from 10 percent to 22 percent. In two New York surveys, bathhouse users reported large numbers of sex partners per year (mean 26-29, median 11-12), and in one survey in Berkeley, bathhouse users reported a mean of 3.2 partners per visit.
“In spite of the fact that there are not large numbers of gay bathhouses and sex clubs, one in five men who have sex with men in New York report visiting them at least once in the previous 12 months. However, it appears that most men who visit bathhouses go there relatively infrequently; only 22 percent in New York visited one or more times per month.”
As part of his outreach, Nassry offered HIV rapid testing in bathhouses and asked patrons to fill out a questionnaire (the study is ongoing). He observed that most of the men were in their late-30s and early 40s, middle- and upper-class and educated. “They were very conscious about what they were doing.”
So, where are the young people—those MSM under 30? “I think the younger crowd is using the Internet—MySpace, Criagslist—and finding their partners that way.”
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