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. 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. Unlike many of its competitors, the Zone is legal. And we provide a safe place,” said Deep, who opened the club in 1991. “My experience with men is men will not stop having sex.
Owner Peter Deep says he has 30,000 names on his list of current and recent members. On weekend nights there are lines of men waiting to get into the two-story Zone on North Sycamore Avenue in Hollywood.
They charge a membership fee, usually in the $10 to $15 range, plus admission fees of $3 to $8 a visit. The clubs have proven popular and profitable. But the clubs do not offer the privacy of the baths, and patrons keep their clothes on. There may be couches, mazes and cubicles with swinging doors. In sex clubs, the decor leans to basic warehouse: Large rooms sometimes so dark patrons can’t see their hands. Vintage Hollywood posters cover the walls, strobe lights flicker, and DJs spin the latest club music. 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. 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. Like gay bathhouses, they are about sex-but in a different setting. Starting in the early 1990s, a second wave of clubs opened as an alternative to the baths.ĭrawing 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.
The recently closed King of Hearts in Silver Lake was said to be 20 years old. Though not as firmly entrenched in gay male culture as the baths, sex clubs have long been around. Often underground operations that come and go, they are not formally regulated by the health department. Estimates of the number of sex clubs vary from about seven to 10. 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.
Enforcement was left largely to the owners. 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. And a club that won a zoning variance to remain open is facing an appeal by a neighborhood group. The building department has cited others for the same reasons. The city attorney’s office recently filed misdemeanor charges against three clubs for operating too close to residential zones. 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. Most of them aren’t where they’re supposed to be. 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.Ĭentered in Hollywood and Silver Lake, the clubs have tended to open without regard for permits. They are under fire, as they have been in other cities in recent years. The past year has been tough for gay sex clubs in Los Angeles.