ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the emergence of sex industry premises, in particular gay bathhouses, into formal land-use processes in Sydney. It traces a shift in regulatory mechanisms in the last decades of twentieth century away from explicitly moral and criminal discourses to planning policies to regulate and organize sex industry premises. The chapter details the regulatory transition of gay bathhouses from a catch-all category of disorderly premises that included other businesses such as brothels, to an official definition that differentiated bathhouses from other sex industry premises. It highlights the centrality of planning to organizing and regulating sex in the city, both historically and in the present. Planning expresses and organizes an idea of urban order, and those sexualities which breach this order are regarded as disorderly, contaminated and polluted. The chapter also analyzes gay bathhouses in 1960s and 1970s, regulation and placement strategies for survival during a time when homosexuality and brothels were illegal, dangerous inner-city and an orderly, pure suburbia.
