Minneapolis City Council moves to legalize adult bathhouses, reversing a 38-year ban

Mayor Jacob Frey is already on board. A spokesperson for the mayor told Fox News Digital he is "in favor of continuing to explore the issue." City Council President Elliott Payne said the plan would be modeled after San Francisco's regulatory approach, with rules focused on safety and public health. If this sounds like a fringe proposal from a fringe city, consider the scope. The council is not debating a single zoning tweak. It is weighing four separate ordinances that would rewrite sections of the city code, the zoning code, the health and sanitation code, and the miscellaneous offenses code, all to carve out legal space for businesses that facilitate sexual activity between adults. What the proposed ordinances would do The first ordinance would add an entirely new chapter to the Minneapolis city code devoted specifically to adult sex venues. It would establish 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 health and sanitation provisions related to contagious diseases. The fourth would rewrite the city's miscellaneous offenses code to create exceptions for licensed venues permitted to host consensual sexual activity. Taken together, the ordinances would strip what advocates call "stigmatizing language" from existing law and replace it with "new definitions to be inclusive of establishments where sexual activity between consenting adults may be facilitated." That language comes directly from the proposed ordinance text. In other words, Minneapolis would not merely tolerate these venues. It would build an entire regulatory apparatus around them, licensing, zoning, health rules, and criminal-code carve-outs, to make them a permanent part of the city's commercial landscape. The 1988 ban and the history behind it The original ban dates to 1988, when Minneapolis passed an ordinance prohibiting businesses that facilitate "high-risk sexual conduct." The law defined that term to include fellatio, anal intercourse, and vaginal intercourse for pay. It arrived during the height of the AIDS crisis, when cities across the country were grappling with how to slow the epidemic's spread. The last adult bathhouse in Minneapolis, the 315 Health Club, actually closed its doors in 1988 before the ban even took effect. The club had shuttered its "orgy rooms" two years earlier. The ban, in effect, codified a reality the market had already imposed. Brian Coyle, the first openly gay member of the Minneapolis City Council, helped pass the 1988 law. He said at the time that many members of the LGBTQ+ community supported the ban. Coyle had been 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 council member who was himself living with HIV championed the original ban is a fact worth pausing on. It suggests the 1988 ordinance was not born from bigotry but from a public health emergency that the community closest to the crisis took seriously. The people now seeking to undo Coyle's work frame it differently.