Basic Plumbing has been told to close. King of Hearts is history. The Prowl has been cited. Neighbors want the Barracks to go away. The Vortex is shuttered.
The past year has been tough for gay sex clubs in Los Angeles. They are under fire, as they have been in other cities in recent years. But for far different reasons.
Whereas elsewhere these indoor trysting grounds for gay men have come under attack for allowing unsafe sex, that most Southern Californian of concerns is at work here: land use.
Centered in Hollywood and Silver Lake, the clubs have tended to open without regard for permits. Most of them aren't where they're supposed to be. Now they are running afoul of local zoning laws dealing with sex businesses, which the city of Los Angeles started to enforce in 1995 after settling a court challenge.
The city attorney's office recently filed misdemeanor charges against three clubs for operating too close to residential zones. The building department has cited others for the same reasons. And a club that won a zoning variance to remain open is facing an appeal by a neighborhood group.
Inevitably, the enforcement has touched nerves. Club owners are feeling embattled. Neighborhood activists are frustrated that some clubs have continued to operate illegally, or that in several instances they were closed, then reopened phoenix-like under new ownership in the same spot.
City officials have had to navigate between neighborhood concerns and the now-prevailing view in Los Angeles that gay sex clubs and bathhouses serve a useful purpose by providing a controlled environment for anonymous sexual encounters. Better behind doors, where condoms and safe sex messages are available, than in public parks and bathrooms, this philosophy goes.
That is a dramatic change from a decade ago when Los Angeles County officials considered bathhouses hotbeds of AIDS transmission and then-Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner vowed "to try and close every single bathhouse in Los Angeles."
He did not succeed.
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Some baths closed. Others fought back in the courts, beginning a legal battle that ended with a 1992 settlement keeping them open with the understanding that they would prohibit anal sex without a condom and offer safe sex information and condoms to patrons. Enforcement was left largely to the owners.
There are now 11 gay bathhouses in the county, fewer than at the onset of the AIDS epidemic but about the same number as the late 1980s. Estimates of the number of sex clubs vary from about seven to 10. Often underground operations that come and go, they are not formally regulated by the health department.
Though not as firmly entrenched in gay male culture as the baths, sex clubs have long been around. The recently closed King of Hearts in Silver Lake was said to be 20 years old. Starting in the early 1990s, a second wave of clubs opened as an alternative to the baths.
Drawing crowds to nondescript buildings that blend anonymously with their surroundings, the clubs usually are bereft of signs or any hint of what they are about.
Like gay bathhouses, they are about sex--but in a different setting.
The baths, which range from the grungy to the scrupulously clean and stylishly decorated, have small private rooms, saunas, steam rooms and common areas that can be quite elaborate. At the upscale Hollywood Spa on Ivar Avenue, towel-wrapped patrons can look each other over while working out on gym equipment or sipping freshly squeezed orange juice from the cafe. Vintage Hollywood posters cover the walls, strobe lights flicker, and DJs spin the latest club music.
In sex clubs, the decor leans to basic warehouse: Large rooms sometimes so dark patrons can't see their hands. There may be couches, mazes and cubicles with swinging doors. But the clubs do not offer the privacy of the baths, and patrons keep their clothes on.
The clubs have proven popular and profitable. They charge a membership fee, usually in the $10 to $15 range, plus admission fees of $3 to $8 a visit.
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On weekend nights there are lines of men waiting to get into the two-story Zone on North Sycamore Avenue in Hollywood. Owner Peter Deep says he has 30,000 names on his list of current and recent members.
"My experience with men is men will not stop having sex. And we provide a safe place," said Deep, who opened the club in 1991.
Unlike many of its competitors, the Zone is legal. Deep applied for a zoning variance, which he needed because he was near a residential area, and got it--no doubt because the club is immediately surrounded by light industry.
He says he spent $100,000 meeting building codes and works hard to be a good neighbor, cleaning up the street, hiring security and providing valet parking for his customers. He has little sympathy for the underground owners. How can they complain of harassment, he wonders, when they knew all along what the zoning restrictions were?
