ABSTRACT

This chapter analyzes the emergence of sex industry premises, in particular gay bathhouses, into formal land-use processes in Sydney. Australia in the late twentieth century. The chapter traces a shift in regulatory mechanisms in the last decades of the twentieth century away from explicitly moral and criminal discourses to planning policies to regulate and organize sex industry premises. This 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.