Movie Review: Gay Sex in 1970s

Last weekend, when I was back at home, Chicago's Music Box Theater featured the documentary Gay Sex in the 1970s, so I thought I'd missed it, but fortuity of fortuities, the cinema ended up canceling its regular midnight film and instead ran the 2005 Joseph Lovett movie, so I hopped on the train in order to catch it before it blew out of the Windy City. I'm glad I didn't miss it. While it isn't the greatest documentary in formal terms, it's is still a moving account of the initial post-Stonewall Riots era in New York City. If I could summarize it in thirty words or less, it testifies to the liberatory possibilities that that lanmark protest, others like it and their aftermath made possible, while also being an epitaph on the death of the (original) dream of gay liberation.

The film's time-frame runs from 1969, the year of Stonewall, until 1981, when the first reports of AIDS, then called GRID, started to flow in. Its method is the typical documentary format; it features talking heads, some of them quite famous (author and activist Larry Kramer, photographer Tom Bianchi, journalist and activist Larry Mass, gay activist and scholar Arnie Kantrowitz) and others not so well known (like my first doctor in New York, Ken Unger, and the late Alvin Baltrop, whose photo is featured above left, © Estate of Alvin Baltrop), nearly all of them male and White, who experienced the period, and intercuts their accounts with many still photos and snippets from prior documentaries and porno films of the era, which effectively convey not only a sense of the libertine attitudes of the period, but evoke quite richly how looked and lived. The photos and other footage immersed me in what is by any measure a lost lifeworld. Even though I know how things turned out (having experienced what were the film's moment's last gasps and having gotten to know some of the veterans of this era before they died), I left the theater feeling not only nostalgia but also sadness, for the people and the ways of living and loving that have been--I don't think it's too strong to say, irrevocably--lost.

Gay Sex in the 1970s starts by talking about sex, naturally enough. Sex between men, on the West Side Piers, which were then abandoned and still standing (and treacherous, as one narrator recounts how people often fell through the rotted flooring into the Hudson River, though he moved through the empty, inviting spaces like a "cat"); sex in the produce storage facilities under the old Elevated Highway (which ran along what's now West Street/the West Side Highway) in what was once lower Manhattan's market and milk-and-egg districts (which are now all condos and stores), beneath the shadow of the then newly-built World Trade Center towers; sex in the Meat Market trucks after dark; sex in parks (the Rambles in Central Park, etc.); sex in bathhouses (which began as saunas or workout facilities, and in some cases grew to approximate entertainment complexes, with live musical shows); sex in the backrooms of bars; sex in sex clubs; sex in doorways in the Village; sex in every nook and cranny on Fire Island; sex wherever it could be enjoyed. A lot of this may be a familiar narrative for anyone familiar with the period, but I admit that I was amazed by some of the details, and the men's excitement in the recounting was infectious. As the stills show, the sex often took place in broad daylight, in view of office buildings and streets, cars, boats; at one point, after the Piers became a hot site, men getting off packed both the buildings and the platforms jutting out into the river as, one of the commentators noted, workmen from the nearby industries ate their lunch nearby, often with amusement, sometimes with indifference, sometimes joining in on the action.

In a word, wherever the men on screen thought or felt they could get and have sex, they did. They did so openly and with abandon. The sex was a primary means of self-exploration and expression, an orgasmic end-in-itself, yet also instrumental (which I'll discuss soon). Because what the film makes clear is that after decades of active government and social repression, culminating in the revolt at Stonewall, things swung dramatically the other way, particularly in New York City. Yet the groundwork had already been laid; people who'd lived through the social transformations of the late 1950s and 1960s, who'd participated in or even just witnessed the Civil Rights and women's rights movements, the Summer of Love, the strife-torn year of 1968, the growing public protests against the Vietnam War, all manifestations of social upheaval and the counterculture; people who were inspired by Marxist-Socialist, Freudian and related liberatory and utopian models of political, social and personal liberation, began acting upon those ideals. They espoused and lived out both positive freedoms (to be gay, to call oneself gay, to have sex without fear, to live as a gay person or as a person who wasn't subscribing to strict conventional, heteronormative strictures) and negative ones (to be left alone, to not be arrested or harrassed, bullied or coerced into heteronormativity, etc.). At the same time, in New York City, a period of social permissiveness, at least in terms of police and state regulation of people's sexual activity took hold. (This was the era of liberal Republican mayor John Lindsey, the liberal Democrat Abe Beam, and the early years of conservative Ed Koch; the state's governor was the liberal Republican Nelson Rockefeller, soon to become Gerald Ford's vice-president.)

What the storytellers emphasize, that differs so radically from today, is that no only was the sex often public and widely available, but also free--or least, in personal economic terms. Lovett doesn't explore the larger issue of the national and local economic crises of the period, which reached their apogee in the years 1974-1976, but what the documentary shows is the increasing move towards privatization and commodification of personal pleasure and sexual activity, a fait accompli from the vantage of 2006; a quasi-democracy of free love on the Piers, in the trucks and other public sex spaces, which did live on into the 1980s, gave way to privatized sexual spaces like the bathhouses (many of which were closed by Koch in response to the AIDS crisis) and the bars, which by the mid-1970s had proliferated (and it was amazing to recall how many, like Kellers, lasted into the early 1990s), which are now the far more sexually constrained and less numerous public bars and clubs, and the abundant private (in some cases quasi-secret) sexual clubs and organizations, some even non-material (except as Internet groups) of 2006. (I should point out that Samuel Delany explores this in several different essays, as well as in his study Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, which focuses on the social ecology and economic and social transformation of that particular neighborhood).

What the imagery from the Piers and other spots (Riverside Drive's paths, Christopher and West Streets) makes clear is how diverse the public spaces, as well as many of the private spaces were, especially before the rise of the clone icon. The pictures show men of all races, ethnicities, ages, and one imagines, classes, participating. Admittedly there were very few women in (m)any of these spots, though Bette Midler got her start singing at the St. Mark's Baths, and one person who was there notes that stars like Shirley McLaine even showed up to take in the shows! But it was surprising to see the number of Black and brown men, as well as Asians, that the photographers of that era casually captured. Even if middle-class and upper-middle-class White men became the public face of the gay rights movement (despite the diverse range of participants in the Stonewall Riots themselves), and eventually became the signifiers for an idea of American gayness, the spaces in New York in the 1970s--the sexual spaces and many of the social spaces, the documentary shows--had not yet turned, or at least begun to be represented as, monochrome.

The issue of the sexual (inter)act(ion) and the sexual space as a interesting social node, offering opportunities for cross-class connection and copulation (in all senses of that word), also is evident, though it's not explored too extensive in the film. Lovett does mention particular social spaces like Studio 54, which appeared towards the end of the 1970s, and where the races and classes, from beau monde and jeunesse dorée to working-class and poor New Yorkers who had the right look (or as Halston told one of the interviews, "a big dick"), were able to mingle and party together. Studio 54 is key, because the film notes the rise of disco and reminisces about the many spaces that existed for dancing, which had been criminalized for gay people at New York bars up to 1969. Several of the talking heads pointed out that the dance clubs (including the Saint and the Anvil!) were among the few places where people did not have sex, at least not on the dance floor. Disco, moreover, one speaker notes, brought together the interests and the bodies of Black people and gay people; the centerpiece of this was the famous Paradise Garage (which I went to as it was on its last legs), where disco music, which so disgusted the mainstream until John Travolta heteronormatized and popularized it in Saturday Night Fever (and it was already on its deathbed). One serious fault with the documentary was its lack of people of color. Baltrop was the only non-White commentator, and there was also only one woman.

Another profound aspect of the sex, the documentary suggests, as I said above, is its the utopian aspects, to which many of the talking heads subscribed. It was more than satisfaction of the libido (which sometimes took an entire day's worth of attempts), though the orgasm was crucial, or an acting out of the no-longer repressed pleasure principle; sex became the means for working out ideas about freedom, for creating friendships across barriers, and, in some cases, the opportunities for profound spiritual and romantic connections. The film doesn't shy away from the underside of this, though; many men, it suggests, though there'd be no cost. Dr. Unger describes the STD problems, as does another person in the film, who mentions that there were periods of intense STD outbreaks, some confined almost exclusively to gay men. Yet the artist Borton Benes points out that men saw the health department's offices as a cruising spot, and no one took very seriously what the ultimate costs, at least in health terms, might be. The documentary also broaches the issue of the extensive drug use, from pot to poppers to acid to valium to cocaine, and how this both enabled sexual intimacy but also fed into addictions that destroyed some people and the early values that existed. I read many of the comments as saying that many of the participants viewed the sex as value-positive or neutral--positive in what it gave them on multiple levels, but neutral in moral and ethical terms, especially now that the moral compass had been not only reset, but cast off.

The saddest part of the documentary, then, is what we know is coming: the AIDS era, which it races through. The stories have lost none of their power to depress, in no small part because they're about death; those who narrative were and are the survivors. To give one example, one of the storytellers tells about when he and his boyfriend what he realized was an orgy on Fire Island where, he pointed out, all the men he'd wanted to sleep with in the Village were present, as well as all the men who were his type on the Island. Yet his boyfriend protested and they went home. The dénouement? Only he and his boyfriend survived of all the men who were in that room that day. Larry Kramer gets a bit more airtime during this part of the documentary, because of his chief role in starting Gay Men's Health Crisis and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP), whose early boards, he points out, convened the very men who'd met through sex in the city and Fire Island just years before. The film ends on beautiful but very sad note, citing a passage from Kramer's Faggots (1978), which was reviled at its appearance for its title, its stark portrayal of gay male promiscuity, and its extremely graphic diction, yet which was really and unfortunately premonitory in its reading of what was to come. One question I wondered was, did it have to end in this way? What might have happened had AIDS not appeared on the horizon, or if the participants had decided to change some of their behavior, yet not the threat or guide of anti-gay moralism, on their own, in advance of its appearance?

What have we lost with the death, at least in mainstream gay culture, of the early dreams of gay liberation? The dream of equal treatment under the law, which was one aspect of gay liberation, remains a goal for LGBT people across the country; yet for many, the dream of being able to live a heteronormative life in almost every way except for the sex/gender of partner also is a goal (that has, in some cases, been realized). Putting it another way, to be commodified as readily as heterosexuals, to become part of the system without any recognition of difference, is what the mainstream gay movement is after. Yet what lay at the core of gay liberation that might benefit us today? Bracketing off for a moment the real time realization of the limitless libido, the unbounded phallos and/or anus and life as a polymorphously perverse pleasure chain and assemblage, a quasi-Deleuzian reterritorialization of a different sort--what of gay liberation's strains of utopianism, some of which were realized, what about its emphasis on liberation of the body, mind and spirit, on a radical equality--at least in ideal terms--of sexes and genres and the elimination of fixed gender roles, on the "new society of the future" that the Gay Liberation Front wrote about in their famous A Gay Manifesto of 1971? Gay Sex in the 1970s offers no answers, but it does provide a glimpse at what was, and who and what--in some key ways--was lost forever.

***

A Post-script: I'd never heard of Alvin Baltrop (1952-2004), and completely missed his photos when they showed at the Leslie-Lohman Gallery about five years ago. Gully.com has a piece by Kelly Cogswell on him and his work, "Another Black Experience: Gay Daddy." His assistant Randal Wilcox, also a photographer, published a writeup in Trace. Some images from the estate are visible here.