Last Updated on March 24, 2020
A San Francisco BDSM parlor called The Gates stays open to the public despite the Covid-19 health scare. Apparently taking the Corona scare under advisement, the home page for bondage and fantasy house brings you directly to a COVID-19 Update.
“Many of the providers that use our space want to continue seeing their clients, either during their normally scheduled office hours, or by special arrangement on days that they are not on our posted schedule.”
This “premier house of bondage and fantasy” which has been open since 1994 claims that during this global pandemic, “our mission remains unchanged.”
The bondage house continues to operate at a time when businesses and their employees all over the country are suffering from restrictions placed on what some in government call non-essential businesses.
Very much like the flu, the coronavirus is most commonly transmitted through respiratory droplets that contain the virus. While these droplets are too big to linger in the air, they can remain on any surface. According to new research compiled by National Institutes of Health, Princeton University and UCLA this, the virus can still live in the air for up to three hours, and contaminated droplets can live on surfaces for up to three days.
The owner and proprietor of the Gates SF, known as Mistress Sage, says that these are not problems for the BDSM Dungeon, and that they will be “expanding” bio-containment policies effective immediately.”
Mistress Sage claims to have taken on a vigorous sanitation regimen in order to keep her bondage dungeon operational, aiming to evade the spread of COVID-19 by: disinfecting all doorknobs, light switches, equipment and surfaces in session rooms; having guests wash their hands before and after sessions; halting the “wet body worship” or “spitting scenes”, suspending the use of non-machine washable gags, and asking symptomatic customers to remain at home.
Brothels and Sex Dungeons everywhere have been trying to find loopholes for social distancing by providing online services, or requesting donations to keep their sex workers financially stable during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these efforts by the sex work industry, The Gates SF decided to leave their doors wide open.
Laws governing the BDSM industry are a bit “murky,” according to one aficionado who writes at Evilleeye.com. The mistresses over at The Gates offer many services that are still categorized as assault and battery including “whipping” and “various forms of torture.”
For many years the state of California has been easing up on their laws surrounding the transmission of communicable disease. Particularly in 2018 under SB 239 California updated its HIV transmission laws to decriminalize the act of knowingly spreading the to a healthy partner without their knowledge.
Although this law doesn’t apply to sex workers, The Gates is one particular establishment that wouldn’t attract legal ramifications as they outwardly advertise that all contracted sex workers do not preform any acts of penetration.
According to the most recent updates from the New York Times, the Bay Area, which is also home to the Gates, has the highest concentration of confirmed cases in California.
Due to the anonymity of patrons of The Gates, it is impossible to track if or how many COVID-19 transmissions occur in their BDSM dungeon. Since the COVID-19 virus can remain transmissible for days after contamination and the symptoms don’t develop from five – 14 days, sex workers could possibly be catching the virus and spreading it to their clients for up to two weeks before the call into work sick.
