The San Diego City Council has repealed a section of city code set down during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis that city leaders said was outdated and homophobic.
Established in April 1988 and last updated in 1991, Chapter 4 Article 2 Division 4 of the San Diego Municipal Code places strict restrictions on bathhouses in the city that "encourage, facilitate and/or knowingly allow their patrons to engage in sexual practices that pose a significant risk for the transmission of HIV."
Council President Joe LaCava has made it a priority of his leadership to clean up or eliminate outdated or redundant language in the city code. He said a staff member found the above language and brought it to his attention.
"This language does not reflect who we are as a city," LaCava said Tuesday. "It is outdated and offensive perspective and I do not support this kind of language."
He said that while the San Diego Police Department and/or the city's Development Services Department no longer enforce the ordinance, that was no reason to leave it on the books.
"Repealing it is a smart signal of how far we have come as a society," LaCava said.
When the code was written in 1988, more than 700 San Diegans had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS and half of those people had died. The language said that not only were bathhouses allowing for risky sexual encounters, but fostering it -- and claim that officials say amounted to a homophobic stereotype, which has changed dramatically since the virus first arrived in the United States in the early 1970s.