I was a listener during the workshop and asked questions like "What kind of lube did you use?" I have no charming or arousing anecdotes from the glory days of gay sexual culture in the 70s. I was wearing diapers. Alas, these were not for any sort of daddy/boy scene on Folsom Street. They were Huggies. I had a bottle of formula, not a bottle of poppers. I was born after Stonewall. I missed the party.

Ironically, the very next night, I attended a San Francisco public health department meeting on reopening the bathhouses. Activist Michael Petrelis hijacked the meeting from the get go, which was a good thing, because Health Department Director Mitch Katz was fifteen minutes late. Around 100 people showed up and around 20 spoke. ACTUP SF was a vocal presence with signs saying "Fire the Liars! Open the Baths!" The posters had the faces of Mitch Katz and LGBT Health Services Coordinator Dana Van Gordner. Across their faces was "HIV IS A LIE." The ACTUP folks argued that: 1. AIDS was over, 2. HIV does not cause AIDS, 3. Seroconversions reached their peak in SF in 1982 and have been declining ever since. This statement was actually based on a 1997 study which Katz co-authored. The study was handed out by ACTUP SF.

Many in the room were appreciative of the energy and anger that ACTUP brought into the room, but groans and snickers from non-ACTUPpers made it clear that these theories about no relationship existing between HIV and AIDS were not shared by many outside their ranks.

Katz said that it was the city's position that the bathhouses should remain closed and that they weren't even considering reopening them. Why then a public forum? Van Gorder agreed to a public forum after he ran into Petrelis while cruising at Nob Hill Theatre. Van Gorder said he'd been to every kind of sexual space in the city, but that since he'd turned 42, he found such sex unfulfilling emotionally. He said that most gay men had turned their attention away from bathhouses toward more meaningful interactions, and that we should focus on the building of the Community Center. Katz proudly asserted that he'd never been to a bathhouse and that his position was therefore unhypocritical.

So here we have two men in high health posts: One a doctor who brags about his avoidance of bathhouses, as if that would somehow absolve him of his sex-phobic positions; another who has frequented sexual spaces, but maintains that gay men ought to aim higher morally. It was a gross spectacle indeed. Neither provided a shred of scientific evidence how bathhouses, locking doors, or showers were connected to HIV transmission. Almost every audience member screamed out something along the lines of "Where's the science?" but the two men sidestepped the issue without much finesse.

The evening ended with ACTUP following Katz and Van Gorder out, chanting. It's nights like these I realize why I moved to San Francisco.

The notion that laws against bathhouses protect us from further seroconversions is infantilizing and disempowering. These regulations keep us all in diapers. We know how to have safer sex by now. If someone has chosen to have unprotected sex, no health department regulations will stop him or her. How many times have men and women heard their tricks say "I don't have any condoms in the house"? Privatizing sex doesn't make people safer or less promiscuous. It just drives sex underground, even further from the bosom of the Department of Health.

In a public sexual space, there are opportunities to gather large groups of men and women together to launch creative prevention strategies, distribute protective devices, and foster peer support for safer play. Fear isn't working to keep people negative, kids. It's time to try something else.

We're 20 years into an epidemic that is a bitter dowry for the young people in this community. Most young people have heard romanticized versions of what gay sexual culture was like before AIDS, told by survivors. Sometimes it feels like listening to Uncle Lester talk about catching a trout that was "this big." Knowing the history of our sexual culture has been challenging. So many of the architects of that sexual culture are gone. AIDS panic has restored the puritanical, fearful climate that the 70s promised to destroy. Our sexual culture is a vital part of our heritage and lifeblood.

I moved to San Francisco four months ago from Virginia, another place with no bathhouses. Dry counties, as it were. I've been to bathhouses in Chicago, San Diego, D.C., Boston and Pittsburgh. The experiences I've had there have been transforming and liberating.

Locking doors are important to me, and I think they're vital to our culture. Locking doors afford privacy, hence conversation. These conversations allowed my partners and I to talk, cuddle, and negotiate more explicitly the parameters of our sex. We swapped ideas and life stories, email addresses, touch. Such exchanges don't happen as often or as fully in regulated open rooms, where a tense silence has replaced conversation. I've learned valuable queer folk history from older men I've played with in bathhouses and adult bookstores behind locking doors. Private rooms allow several forms of oral history to be transmitted between generations. These exchanges are essential to the survival and growth of our culture.

Private rooms afford solace for people who feel marginalized because of their age or body image. The open rooms are not kind to men who feel judged and dismissed by a culture that prioritizes young white gym bodies. We need more democratic sex spaces where people of all ages, races and body types can articulate and meet their sexual needs. Not that bathhouses are going to magically make men more accepting. Gay men are dogs in sex clubs and theyÕre dogs in bathhouses. But the geography of the space is more open.

I know many men of all ages who feel so intimidated that they don't go to sex clubs in San Francisco. And there's embarrassingly little room for women and transgender folks in the sexual culture for which San Francisco is world renowned. Right now, it's either baths with no nookie, or nookie with no baths. A 'mecca' can do better.

I imagine an entire generation of young queers who long to wander the hallways, towel wrapped, freshly scrubbed. The keys to our private rooms jingle on elastic bands stretched over our biceps and ankles. We are able to shower between partners, which seems to me a polite hygienic gesture. In the new millennium, I want bathhouses that welcome people of all genders. I want bathhouses that nourish the sexually starved. I want bathhouses that bring together young and old, travelers, locals and transplants, the body beautiful and rest of us mortals.

I want bathhouses where I can talk, fuck, spank, laugh, have a Snickers and a Coke, take a nap, see friends, flirt, come, and finally, wash away the evening's sticky remnants.

And I want those bathhouses to be in my new hometown.