Nearly 40 years ago, Minneapolis passed a ban on public bathhouses, sites for anonymous sex and LGBTQ activism during the 20th century. 

The 1988 ordinance, though ostensibly passed to slow the spread of HIV in Minneapolis, is considered by modern historians as the result of gentrification, homophobia and growing prevalence of police raids on bathhouses, despite overall lower levels of police violence toward the queer community.

Now, the Minneapolis City Council is discussing an ordinance to reverse the ban, representing a huge step toward recognizing Minneapolis’s LGBTQ history.

University of Minnesota history doctoral student Myra Billund-Phibbs said bathhouses became a target for anti-LGBTQ activism as AIDS came to Minneapolis, leading to closures and ultimately the ordinance.

“By the mid-1980s, the baths take a huge hit socially and the scene of public sex really changes,” Billund-Phibbs said. “Even as policing is becoming tamer and less entrapping and less violent towards gay public sex than it was in the late 70s.”

For decades, bathhouses served as adult spaces primarily used by gay men to engage in sexual activity. These community centers required minimal licensing and faced lower levels of policing relative to other queer spaces.

Though bathhouses held several functions in the LGBTQ community, including providing spaces for activism, escaping violence and meeting others in the community, it’s important to remember the primary service of these bathhouses: sex. 

Public historian Noah Barth said a discomfort around gay sex is important to understanding the bathhouse ban and how queer history is discussed more broadly.

“There is a struggle to talk about sex and the sex part of sexuality,” Barth said. “We really struggle to talk about bathhouses and the multiple reasons that they were important.”

At the time of the ban, sodomy was still a felony in Minnesota, and would continue to be criminalized until 2001, when a district judge ruled these laws violated the right to privacy under the Minnesota Constitution. Spaces like bathhouses were critical for gay men to express themselves sexually, during a time when being caught having sex with a man could ruin your life.

The ordinance itself was in many ways an extension of these regulations on queer sexuality. Barth noted the original text of the ordinance attacked sexual acts associated specifically with gay men and sex workers. 

“Institutions, including the government, are always in the business of regulating specifically queer sexuality and not heterosexuality,” Barth said. “They target places like bathhouses and bars where queer sex can happen without doing that to heterosexual people.”

Billund-Phibbs said the topic of sex is missing from coverage on the ordinance. Instead of highlighting the primary purpose of bathhouses — anonymous sex — the media has framed them as predominantly community spaces.

Though this characterization may not be entirely inaccurate, it does obscure the reality of bathhouses, thus limiting our ability to truly engage with our city’s queer history.

Barth highlighted how Minnesota-specific cultural norms may have further hindered the city from speaking openly about its history of sex and sexuality.

“What we’re sort of confronting in Minneapolis is this Midwestern sensibility that doesn’t really want to talk about these topics,” Barth said. “You know, we’re not in San Francisco, we’re not New York or Chicago, and now, we are really boldly confronting the issue of sexuality in our city.”

But just because it isn’t acknowledged, it doesn’t mean that history isn’t there. Minneapolis has strippers, cruisers and LGBTQ people across the gender and sexuality spectrums, and all of these communities have played a major role in shaping our city into what it is today. 

Understanding the bathhouse ban in this context means engaging with the unsanitized reality of what these spaces meant for the community. Gay men at the time needed spaces for community, but also to simply have sex, something heterosexual individuals have always been allowed to do. 

Repealing the ordinance is an important step toward acknowledging the harm done to queer people and repairing the damage done by decades of state intrusions into the intimate lives of everyday people. 

But in order for us to reckon with the systemic erasure of the LGBTQ community in public history, we must be honest about what these spaces were for, even if that means entering uncomfortable but honest conversations about sex, sexuality and how that has impacted Minneapolis. 

“To target a specific group of people that participate in a specific group of acts is discrimination,” Barth said. “Repealing this ordinance is undoing an injustice.”