Subject: SF bathhouse ballot unveiling, today 1 pm, City Hall
From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 3 May 1999 02:18:56 EDT

For Immediate Release
May 3, 1999
Contacts:
Steve Filandrinos,  415-551-0901
Michael Petrelis,    415-621-6267

             BATHHOUSE BALLOT INITIATIVE UNVEILING AT CITY HALL;

                   Gays Demand Equal Sexual Privacy in San Francisco

San Francisco, CA - Safer sex activists filed papers last week with the 
Department of Elections to place a ballot initiative before voters this 
November designed to overturn the City's longstanding prohibition of sexual 
privacy in commercial sex establishments, specifically bathhouses.  Activists 
have been frustrated for years with the City's lack of initiative and 
backward health policy which have kept the bathhouses closed without any 
defensible public health rationale.

The exact wording of the initiative, tentatively titled the STD Reduction 
Initiative Non-Discrimination Policy will be unveiled at a news conference on 
the steps of City Hall before the regular Board of Supervisors general 
meeting.

    WHEN:      Monday, May 3

     TIME:       1:00 p.m.

    WHERE:    City Hall
                     1 Carlton Goodlett Place

The initiative was filed by Michael Petrelis, a spokesperson for the activist 
group Queer Nation.  "Our message is loving and simple: Let our people cum, 
safely and behind closed doors at public bathhouses," said Petrelis.  "We 
want to increase the venues for gay men to engage in consensual safer sex, 
including sodomy.  Opposing the bathhouse ballot initiative is tantamount to 
sleeping with Jesse Helms and Pete Knight, homophobic politicians all too 
happy with San Francisco's reactionary AIDS prevention policies."

Members of another group, Health Watch, will meet with Mayor Willie Brown on 
May 8.  They will discuss the lack of public health data behind the City's 
policy related to bathhouses.  In addition, they will question Health 
Director Mitch Katz, who has failed to deliver a defensible rationale for 
denying sexual privacy to gay men.  A spokesperson for Health Watch , Steve 
Filandrinos, arranged the meeting to educate Brown about widely accepted, 
sex-affirmative STD prevention strategies ignored by the City's health 
director.

"This initiative addresses  the homophobia masquerading as STD prevention at 
the Department of Public Health (DPH).  It is universally recognized that 
privacy, together with empowerment and education, are central to effective 
STD prevention, " says Filandrinos, "Current repressive DPH strategies--which 
selectively target gay sex -- are discriminatory and create an environment of 
silence and vulnerability to STD transmission."  

    -30-