Sex

Minneapolis Might Bring Back Bathhouses As Spaces for Sex and Queer Community

It’s a public health matter, say proponents of the new bathhouse ordinances.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 4.8.2026 12:46 PM

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(Illustration: Midjourney)

The Minneapolis City Council is considering a proposal to bring back bathhouses where people can have sex. And it's provoking a wider conversation around stigma, criminalization, and community.

The proposal involves four related measures, introduced on March 26. They include plans to amend regulations for places "where sexual activity between consenting adults may be facilitated" and to update "provisions pertaining to indecent conduct and disorderly houses, adding exceptions for licensed establishments where sexual activity between consenting adults may be facilitated." (See here, here, here, and here for more.)

"The council is expected to take up the ordinance discussion again on Thursday," per KSTP, a local ABC affiliate.

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"From the beginning, this policy has been shaped by and for community," Councilmember Elliott Payne, who co-authored the proposals, told KSTP. "These venues are historically LGBTQ spaces, with advocacy organizations emphasizing their importance in the community."

A Brief Bathhouse History

Bathhouses go back to ancient times in some societies. In America, they gained popularity along with urbanization and concerns over hygiene in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Cities opened free bathhouses as a means of promoting "healthful living" and "as a necessity for counteracting the unsanitary conditions of the occupants of tenement and lodging houses and dwellings not provided with bath facilities," as Francis E. Fronczak, New York health commissioner, put it in 1915.

Over time, some of these city bathhouses became known as spots where men would go to have sex with other men, and some bathhouses would open specifically, if discreetly, for this purpose.

"Despite the stepped-up attacks on gay baths and bars during the 1950s … more baths–and........

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