The Minneapolis City Council is preparing to consider a package of ordinances that would legalize and regulate adult sex venues, including bathhouses, where consenting adults can engage in sexual activity, potentially reversing a ban the city enacted in 1988 at the height of the AIDS crisis.
Four separate proposals would rewrite sections of the city code, zoning code, health and sanitation code, and miscellaneous offenses code to create a licensing framework for businesses built around facilitating sexual activity. A spokesperson for Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told Fox News Digital that the mayor is in favor of continuing to explore the issue.
If the council moves forward, Minneapolis would join a small number of American cities that formally regulate such establishments, and it would do so by dismantling a public-health measure that its own openly gay council member championed nearly four decades ago.
The proposals, as described by CBS News reporting cited in the Fox News Digital account, cover four distinct areas of city law. The first would add an entirely new chapter to the Minneapolis city code dedicated to adult sex venues, establishing licensing requirements and business regulations for any establishment that facilitates sexual activity between consenting adults.
A second ordinance would update definitions and standards in the city's zoning code for sexually oriented uses. A third would amend provisions in the health and sanitation code related to contagious diseases. The fourth would carve out exceptions in the city's miscellaneous offenses code for licensed venues permitted to facilitate consensual sexual activity.
Taken together, the four measures would replace the 1988 ordinance that banned businesses facilitating what the city defined as "high-risk sexual conduct", a term that covered fellatio, anal intercourse, and vaginal intercourse for pay. Advocates have pushed to strip what they call "stigmatizing language" from the code and replace it with "new definitions to be inclusive of establishments where sexual activity between consenting adults may be facilitated."
City Council President Elliott Payne has said the plan to regulate bathhouses would be modeled after San Francisco, which maintains regulations focused on safety and public health.
The original 1988 ordinance arrived during a period of intense fear over the spread of HIV and AIDS. The Minnesota Star Tribune reported that bathhouses and sex clubs had operated in Minneapolis until the ban shut them down. The last adult bathhouse in the city, the 315 Health Club, had already closed its so-called "orgy rooms" two years before it shut its doors entirely, and it went dark before the ordinance even took effect.
Brian Coyle, the first openly gay member of the Minneapolis City Council, helped pass the law. The Tribune reported that Coyle said at the time that many members of the LGBTQ+ community supported the ban. Coyle himself was diagnosed with HIV in 1986 but did not publicly acknowledge it until 1991. He died that same year of AIDS-related complications at age 47.
That a gay lawmaker who died of AIDS pushed the ban, with community support, is a fact worth sitting with. The ordinance was not born of bigotry. It was born of a public-health emergency that was devastating the very community these new proposals claim to serve.
In 2023, activists with the Safer Sex Spaces Coalition succeeded in changing the language of the 1988 ordinance. Now they want the law gone entirely.
The Safer Sex Spaces Coalition has argued that the ban targeted same-sex partnerships and individuals with HIV and AIDS, and that it discouraged outreach while driving sex-related gatherings to what the group calls "unsafe and inaccessible spaces." The coalition released a statement laying out its case:
"The Minneapolis Health Department and other public health organizations acknowledge this ordinance is no longer the tool needed to promote public health. Social science research tells us that commercial sex spaces, like gay saunas, are important for promoting safer sex practices, enhancing HIV prevention, and increasing access to testing and treatment. These spaces also enhance feelings of identity, camaraderie, authenticity, and belonging. They are spaces where people overcome isolation and develop a sense of community and pride."
That framing treats licensed sex venues as community health centers. It is a remarkable claim. The coalition asserts that the Minneapolis Health Department itself agrees the ordinance is outdated, though no direct statement from the department appears in the available reporting.
The bathhouse push fits a broader pattern of progressive governance in Minneapolis that prioritizes activist demands over the concerns of ordinary residents. This is the same city whose mayor, Jacob Frey, is currently the subject of a Justice Department investigation over claims of obstructing federal immigration agents. That Frey's office now signals openness to sex-venue licensing while the mayor faces questions about cooperation with federal law enforcement tells you something about where his priorities sit.
Minnesota's broader political leadership has drawn scrutiny on multiple fronts. Governor Tim Walz has faced his own controversies, including his repeated comparisons of ICE agents to the Gestapo, rhetoric that inflames rather than governs.
The state has also grappled with serious accountability questions. A convicted fraudster has claimed that both Attorney General Keith Ellison and Governor Walz knew about fraud in state-funded programs, allegations that raise hard questions about oversight in Minnesota's executive branch.
Against that backdrop, the Minneapolis City Council's decision to spend its time crafting a four-ordinance licensing regime for sex venues is revealing. Cities that cannot keep their streets safe or their federal relationships functional are not cities that should be building new bureaucracies around bathhouse regulation.
Several basic questions remain unresolved. No specific date has been announced for when the council will formally consider the ordinances. The exact text and ordinance numbers of the four proposals have not been made public in available reporting. And while the coalition claims the Minneapolis Health Department supports the change, no direct statement from the department has surfaced.
It is also unclear what safeguards, if any, the licensing framework would impose beyond what San Francisco requires. Payne has pointed to San Francisco as the model, but San Francisco's own track record on public health and quality of life is hardly an advertisement for the approach.
The political dynamics within the council are also opaque. Whether there is enough support to pass four separate code changes, or whether the proposals will face organized opposition from residents, religious communities, or public-health professionals, remains to be seen. Walz himself has generated firestorms over other boundary-crossing decisions, and the bathhouse question could easily become another flashpoint in a state already divided over the direction of its leadership.
Minneapolis voters deserve to know whether their elected officials conducted any serious cost-benefit analysis, consulted neighborhood groups near potential venue sites, or studied the public-health outcomes in cities that have gone down this road. None of that has appeared in the reporting so far.
There is something deeply ironic about the trajectory here. In 1988, a gay council member who was privately battling HIV worked to close bathhouses because he believed it would save lives. Members of his own community supported him. He died two years after the law passed.
Now, 38 years later, activists invoke public health to argue for the opposite conclusion, that reopening sex venues will promote safety. The coalition frames the original ban as a relic of stigma. But the man who championed it was not a culture warrior. He was a dying man trying to protect the people he loved.
Whether the science has changed enough to justify reversal is a legitimate question. But the casual dismissal of the ban's origins, and the eagerness to replace hard-won public-health measures with a licensing scheme modeled on San Francisco, suggests that ideology, not evidence, is driving the bus.
Minneapolis has plenty of real problems. Its leaders keep finding new ones to create.
