Though the Coalition's guidelines have no legal force, sex clubs which flout them frequently find city building and licensing officials breathing down their necks. Community volunteers, agency outreach workers and club staff personally patrol these clubs to look for unsafe activity. To facilitate the monitoring, the coalition forbids private rooms in the sex clubs. It refused to endorse an attempt by Berkeley bathhouse owner Rick Stokes to open a bathhouse in San Francisco in 1994 precisely because its rooms would have had locked doors. Ultimately, the bathhouse proposal never got off the ground.
People say it's homophobic or an intrusion to recommend against locked rooms.
I would respond that this is a way we're going to help each other stay safe. We have to balance our basic civil rights with the fact of the epidemic. Tom Coates, director of the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies at the University of California at San Francisco, surveyed the sexual activities of nearly 2,000 men who meet their sex partners in public sex environments. He found that men who had met partners in public areas in the previous month were two to four times more likely to report having had unprotected anal sex with non-monogamous partners, whether that unsafe sex occurred in the public place or at home. The better situation for a public sex business is one with no doors and with monitoring.