State Sen. Erik Bottcher and Assemblymember Tony Simone, whose districts cover Hell's Kitchen, Chelsea and the West Village, have introduced legislation that would let gay bathhouses reopen in New York for the first time in roughly 40 years. The bill would direct the state to scrap the emergency regulations that shut down the city's adult bathhouses in the mid-1980s and replace them with new licensing, health and safety standards.
According to W42ST, the Public Health Modernization Act, known as S10673, would require the New York State Department of Health to repeal the old rules and publish new licensing and safety standards within 180 days of the bill becoming law. Bottcher and Simone argue the decades-old regulations no longer reflect modern medicine or public-health practice, the outlet reports.
A Ban Forged at the Height of the AIDS Crisis
The rules the bill targets date to October 1985, when the New York State Public Health Council adopted emergency regulations amending Section 24-2.2 of the State Sanitary Code, giving state and local officials power to close bathhouses as public nuisances under Governor Mario Cuomo's administration, according to the Los Angeles Times. Those regulations were used to shutter the city's adult bathhouses in the mid-1980s.
The closures survived a court challenge in January 1986, when the New York State Supreme Court ruled in City of New York v. New St. Mark's Baths that public health emergency mandates outweighed patrons' constitutional privacy and associational claims, per court records from the case. Before the ban, establishments like the St. Marks Baths in the East Village and the Everard Baths in Chelsea had served for decades as social, cultural and political gathering spaces for the city's gay community, according to historical accounts of that era.
Medicine Has Changed Since Bathhouses Were Sealed
The bill's backers point to biomedical advances that didn't exist when the ban took effect. The FDA first approved daily pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for HIV prevention in 2012, decades after New York outlawed bathhouses, according to research on the era's closures.
NYC's HIV Numbers Add Tension to the Timing
The push arrives amid a mixed local picture on HIV. The New York City Department of Health's annual HIV surveillance report, released in December 2025, found that 1,791 New Yorkers were newly diagnosed with HIV in 2024, a 5.4% increase from 2023 and the fourth consecutive year without an annual decline following pandemic-era disruptions to care, according to the city's health department.
Statewide, the picture looks different. The New York State Department of Health reported in the same month that annual new HIV diagnoses fell 36% between 2011 and 2024, though new diagnoses remain disproportionately higher among Black and Hispanic residents, per state health officials.
Other Cities Have Already Reopened the Doors
New York wouldn't be the first city to walk back its 1980s-era bathhouse rules. San Francisco began dismantling its 1984 AIDS-era restrictions in 2020 through legislation from Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, then updated its zoning in 2022 and repealed police permit oversight in late 2024 to clear the way for new adult venues, according to KTVU FOX 2.
Minneapolis followed this year. In June, Mayor Jacob Frey signed city council legislation ending that city's 38-year ban on adult bathhouses and directing municipal departments to build a modern, health-focused licensing system, building on Minneapolis's earlier repeal push.
Local Health Providers Line Up Behind the Bill
Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, the LGBTQ-focused provider that named former CDC HIV prevention director Dr. Demetre Daskalakis its chief medical officer in late 2025, publicly backed the Public Health Modernization Act alongside Bottcher this month, according to Callen-Lorde. If the bill passes, the state Department of Health would still need to write the new licensing, health and safety standards required to actually reopen the venues.
