Safe-Sex Activist Buzz Bense Dies

Buzz Bense, a well-known safe-sex educator, sex club operator, and theater aficionado, died Saturday, November 19 in San Francisco due to complications of liver disease. He was 67.

"Buzz Bense was a wonderful man who saved many lives with his sex-positive approach to HIV education," said Terry Beswick, executive director of the GLBT Historical Society, who recently interviewed Mr. Bense for an oral history of his life and work.

Mr. Bense was involved in the San Francisco sex-positive and HIV education communities for three decades, an era that spanned the bathhouse battles of early 1980s, which he recounted in a presentation at the GLBT History Museum last year.

The bathhouse debate was highly contentious within the local gay community. Bathhouse opponents believed the venues were a breeding ground for AIDS, while those who wanted to keep them open argued that they provided an ideal setting for safer sex education.

San Francisco Department of Public Health director Dr. Mervyn Silverman ordered the closure of the city's bathhouses in October 1984. But the ban did not target bathing facilities per se, but rather private rooms with closed doors that could not be monitored.

In the mid-1980s a new model of sex club emerged with a focus on safer sex education and activities that minimized the risk of HIV transmission.

In 1986 Mr. Bense opened a sex club in a large warehouse at 890 Folsom Street. The space hosted events by groups including J.O. Buddies, Blow Buddies, the San Francisco Jacks, the San Francisco Golden Showers Association, and the Mother Goose Club's "Jack and Jill" parties. It also hosted AIDS benefits and served as the headquarters of Nomenus, an organization that creates sanctuaries for Radical Faeries.

The club at 890 Folsom shut its doors in 1991 with a closing ritual by the Healing Order of the K'Thar Sissies. Not long after, in 1992, Mr. Bense and his partner, Bob West, opened Eros, a sex club and sauna on Market Street in the Castro.

"From the devastating epicenter of the AIDS crisis through the ensuing decades, Buzz Bense was crucial to the development of safe and pleasure-positive sex spaces in San Francisco," Carol Queen, founding director of the Center for Sex and Culture, told the Bay Area Reporter. "His 890 Folsom space nurtured many diverse sex clubs, from all-male events to mixed-gender and -orientation parties like our own Queen of Heaven. When he and Bob West established Eros, it was a signal that gay sex could still be vibrant and public without being unsafe."

In a brief phone interview last month, Mr. Bense said that the time between the bathhouse closures and the first sex club was "kind of a complicated story." Eros, he said, was "much more established." He sold Eros in 2005.

In the early 1990s sex club owners, party operators, and HIV educators, including Mr. Bense, formed the Coalition for Healthy Sex, with the dual purpose of encouraging safer sex and defending clubs from police raids like the one that had occurred at 890 Folsom in July 1989.

CHS worked with the San Francisco Department of Public Health to develop standards for licensing sex clubs as legitimate businesses. Proposed legislation mandated that all rooms must be accessible and lighting must be adequate to allow monitoring by club personnel. The controversial law never passed, but similar rules instituted as health department regulations currently remain in effect.

Mr. Bense worked as a graphic designer, and in addition to helping produce safer sex posters for local organizations, he collected more than 150 posters from San Francisco and around the world. The Center for Sex and Culture presented a showing of his collection, entitled "Safe Sex Bang," in 2013.

"These posters do more than chart the tragedy of an epidemic, of an outsider community reeling from grief, loss, and the decimation of a blooming culture of sexual liberation," Mr. Bense said in a quote from the show's catalog. "The history of these posters is a story of a fight against stigma, hatred, and ignorance; of a community stepping up to take care of its own; of finding a way to extinguish fear and build pride and self-esteem; and of devoted efforts of committed activists to communicate a path to health and survival."

Early Life

Bernard "Buzz" Bense was born in Union, New Jersey, on January 23, 1949. As a child he lived for two years in Germany while his father served in the Air Force. The family moved to White Bear Lake, Minnesota, and he graduated from White Bear High School in 1967.

Mr. Bense attended Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he focused on theater arts. He then moved to Vancouver and completed a master's degree in theater at the University of British Columbia.

After working with theater companies in Canada for several years, Mr. Bense moved to San Francisco in the late 1970s. In recent years he split his time between San Francisco and the Russian River. He died at his San Francisco home where he was in hospice care.

"Losing Buzz has re-opened the door to those terrible, painful times of loss and sorrow, once again making me understand that the greatest gift we can give those who went before us is to remember them," said Ganymede, a longtime friend of Mr. Bense who uses only one name.

Mr. Bense served on the boards of Eye Zen Presents, the house theater company of Counterpulse in San Francisco, and the Pegasus Theater Company in Guerneville, as well as the Billys, a group that puts on outdoor gatherings for gay and bi men.

In 2014 Mr. Bense worked as assistant director for Seth Eisen's play Homo File, about the life of erotic author and tattoo artist Samuel Stewart. Despite being in hospice care, Mr. Bense defied the predictions of the "white coats" and arrived by ambulance for the opening of Eisen's latest show, Rainbow Logic: Arm in Arm with Remy Charlip, earlier this month.

"Buzz was an elder to me and really could speak to the history of San Francisco," Eisen told the B.A.R . "Having been right in the middle of the AIDS pandemic, he was on the cutting edge of saying we're still allowed to have sex and giving the community permission to embrace sexuality and use that as a way of healing ourselves."

Mr. Bense is survived by his sister Susan Kroon, her three children, Betsy, Julie, and Zander; and by a community of friends and loved ones including Bob West, Harriett Kelly, and William Atkins.

A local memorial for Mr. Bense will be planned. Gifts in his memory may be made to the Horizons Foundation at http://www.horizonsfoundation.org.