Back to the baths.

"It's like opening up a

free-beer place next to where

an Alcoholics Anonymous 

meeting congregates," says

Jose Orta, an AIDS activist

who opposes the opening of gay

bathhouses in Austin, Tex., calling them

potential "HIV incubation factories." To

put it mildly, his position has drawn fire.

"I've had people give me the finger," he

says. "I've had people call me names: `sex

nazi,' `faggot hater,' `old queen who can't

get anything at the bathhouse and that's

why you want to shut it down.' "

But the opening of two bathhouses

since September has also sparked a genuine

debate in Austin, the state capital and

perhaps Texas's most progressive city. It's

a debate that, having become already

familiar in larger cities like New York and

San Francisco, is now taking hold elsewhere

as AIDS activists nationwide confront

continuing high rates of HIV infection. Some say it

will become more

common as other

bathhouses open in

midsize cities

throughout

America's heartland.

On one side are

those who, like Orta,

fear that fellow gay

men are slipping

back into behaviors

that led the

community into the

darkness of AIDS in

the late '70s and

early '80s: unsafe

sex, particularly with

multiple partners.

Orta, the former

head of Informe-SIDA, a nonprofit AIDS

education organization in Austin, worries

that the bathhouses pose a particular

danger to men who are struggling with their

sexuality, providing them with an easy way

to make unwise choices about sex. His fears are rooted

partly in his own

experiences: He

believes he was

infected with HIV

when he visited

bathhouses as a

closeted gay man in

the '80s.

The other side

includes some fellow

AIDS educators such

as Oscar Lopez, a

former city

health-program

specialist who became

head of

Informe-SIDA in

February, after Orta

left the post because

of declining health.

Lopez believes that

AIDS activists should focus not on closing

the bathhouses but on getting people to

follow safer-sex practices.

"Our mission is not to be deciding where

they are having sex," he says. "That's none

of our business." Bathhouses help AIDS

educators, he argues, by providing a central location where

they can reach out to gay men, especially

those who are closeted and who might

otherwise be having sex with other men in

public parks or adult bookstores and

theaters--places where there is little or no

safer-sex education. Says Lopez: "It's a

whole new opportunity for us to work with

men we haven't been able to get to at our

other venues."

Not surprisingly, that argument gets

support from Mike Zappas, a Los

Angeles-area businessman who co-owns

Austin's Midtowne Spa, which opened last

summer, along with two other such clubs in

Dallas and Houston. "There is nothing that

takes place at Midtowne that doesn't take

place in every hotel," Zappas says, adding

that Midtowne provides safer-sex kits and

information for its customers and has

hosted fund-raising events to benefit AIDS

prevention organizations.

Indeed, Orta says he has relaxed his

opposition to Midtowne because the club's

management has taken such steps. He

continues, however, to marshal opposition

to another bathhouse, Alternative Clubs

Inc., which opened in February. John

Baley, a leading investor in the Austin ACI 

and one in San Antonio, argues that Orta

should mind his own business.

"It's not right for an individual [to be]

standing off to the side, making decisions

for other people," says Baley, who insists

on calling his facility, which includes

weight-lifting equipment, a health club and

not a bathhouse. "Maybe adult American

citizens can decide for themselves."

Other critics say that publicizing the

bathhouse issue plays into the hands of

powerful antigay forces in Texas and

elsewhere. They argue that bathhouse

opponents, whether gay or straight, are

engaging in attacks on sexual liberty in

general and on gay sex in particular.

The issue of gay men's sexual freedom

quickly came to the fore last year in San

Francisco when openly gay city supervisor

Tom Ammiano proposed legislation that

would have regulated the city's numerous

sex clubs. Although city officials closed San

Francisco's bathhouses in 1984 in reaction

to the first wave of the AIDS epidemic,

they have allowed sex clubs to operate,

in part because, unlike bathhouses, sex clubs

do not provide facilities for private sexual

activity. Instead the sex clubs subscribe to 

voluntary guidelines that include forbidding

locked doors and private areas where

patrons might engage in unprotected anal

sex, providing safer-sex materials, and

monitoring patrons to stop unsafe sex.

Sex club owners nonetheless complained of

occasional raids by city authorities, including

the police and fire departments. It was in part

to provide the clubs with protection from

such harassment that Ammiano proposed to

regulate them. Many sex club owners

supported the regulatory measure, which was

also backed by the city's I health department.

But when the proposal became public, it

was denounced as a threat to sexual

freedom. "Gay men do not need more

governmental interference in our sex

lives," stated activist Michael Petrelis.

Indeed, the debate resulted in some activists

calling for a reopening of bathhouses in

San Francisco. In the end the proposed

measure went nowhere when Mayor Willie

Brown said he would rather the city's health

department simply monitor sex clubs'

compliance with the existing guidelines.

Moves to open bathhouses in the '90s

reflect "a desire not to allow AIDS to roll

back the gains of the gay sexual

revolution," says Gabriel Rotello, an author

and activist whose forthcoming book,

Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of

Gay Men, studies the epidemiology of

AIDS, including the role the bathhouse

culture of the '70s and early '80s played in

helping HIV decimate the gay community.

But Rotello-- who believes bathhouses and

sex clubs should be strictly monitored to

prohibit patrons from engaging in unsafe

sex--worries that too many people have

placed a higher value on individual freedom

than on protecting the community as a

whole from a disease that threatens to

destroy it. "In ecology," he says, "we have

learned that libertarian concerns can be and

must be superseded when you're talking

about polluting the community for

everybody."

Raising the stakes, says Rotello, are

strains of HIV now earned by a significant

percentage of gay men that appear to be

resistant to available medicines, even the

promising protease inhibitors, which have

shown--so far-- a remarkable ability to

help suppress the virus in some patients. A

renaissance of the bathhouse culture would

only encourage the wider prevalence of

these drug-resistant strains. "If you

reconstitute those viral highways, those

will be the strains that are chosen by

evolution," Rotello says. "And if that

happens, then God help us."

It's a debate that's unlikely to result in

consensus anytime soon. In Austin, Orta

says that although the stress from the

controversy has taken a toll on his health,

he doesn't regret taking a stand on the

issue. "Once I tested positive, one of my

jobs was to stem the spread of HIV," he

says. "And I took the only stand that I

could live with."