IS IT POSSIBLE to talk about gay sex in the 1970’s without talking about hiv/aids in the 1980’s? Are we justified in presenting the 70’s as the decade in which gay men had anonymous sex in public parks, backrooms, and bathhouses, all under the guise of “gay liberation”? The release of a new documentary, Gay Sex in the 70s, raises these and other questions. The documentary made its first appearance last summer at a number of film festivals from New York to Seattle. The seductive title and the offer of a walk down memory lane, not to mention the erotic imagery used to promote it, enticed standing-room-only crowds to these screenings. At the film’s debut at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, director Joseph F. Lovett explained that his interest in making the film resulted from a conversation he had with a young gay couple in their twenties who were completely unaware of the unbridled sexual activity that took place among gay men in New York in the 70’s.
Told from the perspective of informing a generation that was largely ignorant of this history, Gay Sex in the 70’s is a nostalgic documentary that chronicles the ways and means of gay sex of the period: cruising on Christopher Street or on the Chelsea piers or on the loading docks in delivery trucks; touring the famous bars and bathhouses of the Village; going to Fire Island. All this is peppered with comments from many who lived through the era, from political activist and writer Larry Kramer lamenting his days at the baths in New York, to photographer Tom Bianchi discussing his first experience with anal sex, to accounts by local artists who describe the challenge of getting any work done amid all that sexual opportunity. Lovett also talks with a number of archivists who collected and preserved artifacts from this period.
As the documentary unfolds, images of bare-chested, beautiful bodies huddled together in dark rooms, however stimulating at the outset, become less so with repetition, as the film slowly begins to hint at the demise of this brief sexual paradise. A doctor comments on the vast, vicious outbreak of sexually transmitted diseases, while a former resident of Greenwich Village describes his doctor’s shock at discovering that he’d contracted gonorrhea in his throat. By this time the musical score has shifted to a more somber melody, and the characters begin speaking more seriously, more emphatically, more fearfully; no longer do they laughingly recount the experience of unrestricted sex. Instead, they comb through scattered photographs and select pictures of lost loved ones, friends who died of what was then an unknown virus. The camera pauses, capturing the complicated emotions packed in only a gesture or a sentence, recording the shock that returns to their faces as they remember first hearing of an epidemic that only affected gay men.
By continuing to emphasize the fear and confusion surrounding HIV as a result of unbridled sex among gay men, the writers and director of Gay Sex in the 70s, as well as other novelists, playwrights, and historians who describe the initial outbreak of hiv/aids in the gay community, often employ a similar narrative arc—one that is both historically narrow and puritanically condemning of the gay community. These stories generally begin with the political uprising of Stonewall and culminate in gay liberation as articulated—and practiced—as unfettered sexual opportunity, which comes to a crashing halt with the onslaught of hiv/aids in the early 80’s. In his contribution to a 1988 volume on gay radical history, for example, British historian John Shiers wrote, “In America, the home of the specialized sexual fantasy and of recreational sex as a lifestyle, the seventies’ generation of new male homosexuals has been precisely those people most affected by the health crises imposed by AIDS. The funeral pyre has replaced the hi-energy music for literally thousands of gay men who have met painful, premature, and such senseless deaths.”
It would be pointless to deny that a line can be drawn between the debauchery of the 70’s and the onslaught of AIDS in the 80’s—but is it the only line? The question becomes, does the historical account of the gay men in the 70’s always need to follow this one trajectory? Is there a way to talk about gay culture in the 70’s without talking about AIDS? The answer matters, it seems to me, because this interpretation of events may well have influenced the subsequent course of gay liberation (not to mention notions of gay sex). One result of this interpretation is that many people and events get left out of the story of the 70’s because they don’t fit the received storyline.
By presenting the AIDS outbreak of the 80’s as the inevitable result of the rampant sex of the 70’s, gay writers and filmmakers are unwittingly perpetuating a right-wing morality play, one that deliberately ignores the role the government played—or failed to play—by not reporting the first cases and declaring an epidemic. What if the government had devoted the necessary funds and launched the kinds of public health campaigns that might have alerted the American public in general and the gay community in particular to the outbreak? It’s quite possible that the virus could have been nipped in the bud, as it largely was in Europe, without the carnage that followed, and we would now see the 70’s in an altogether different light.
When filmmakers and historians draw a single causal line from promiscuity in one decade to AIDS in the next, they’re imposing a moral narrative upon what is a historical process. Certainly, the rampant sex of the 1970’s could have facilitated the spread of HIV; it could also have facilitated the spread of evangelical religion among gay people. And it actually did. Reacting to the rising tide of anonymous sex, thousands of gay men joined Troy Perry’s Metropolitan Community Church starting in the early 70’s. Founded in L.A. in 1968, the church had attracted only a handful of men a year later, but by 1971, at the height of the sexual liberation movement, an estimated 1,000 men joined the congregation, which has since grown exponentially and expanded throughout the world. The New York newspaper Gay (vol. 2, no. 50, 1973) featured an article on Perry and his followers in 1973 showing hundreds of men in attendance at a religious service. Dressed in coat and tie, some donning the more fashionable styles of the era, the men sit in a crowded church, participating in one of the first openly gay religious services in the country. Yet when we imagine the 70’s as a moment of sexual bliss that preceded the AIDS outbreak, images of gay men in Church do not usually make it into this chronology.
Indeed, for all the images of gay men as purely hedonistic and immoral throughout the 70’s, religion remained a central concern to many gay men. Gay ran many articles in 1973 on issues relating to gay men and religion. Notwithstanding its often humorous and ironic bent, the paper’s focus on religious issues included an exposé by Leo Skir called “A Good Jewish Boy Attends a Christian Service,” articles on a book called God Is Gay, by Ezekial Wright and Daniel Inesse, and a whole series reporting on Troy Perry and his activist campaigns to agitate for equality for gay men. Historians don’t tend to focus on how the era’s sexual excess produced a backlash within the gay community, causing some gay men to haul off to suburban domesticity and others to religious faith.
The pattern of connecting excessive sex with the spread of HIV is a subset of the larger claim that promiscuous sex is fundamental to gay identity. In describing gay life in 1983 for a gay almanac, writer John Rechy wrote: “Because our sex was forbidden harshly and early by admonitions of damnation, criminality, and sickness, sexual profligacy became—not for all of us but for many more than we claim—an essential, even central, part of our lives, our richest form of contact, at times the only one.”* While conceding that not all gay men were a part of this world, Rechy (along with many others) goes on to ignore the many experiences that didn’t involve a cruise down Christopher Street or a tour of the bathhouses, and the many men who decided to retreat into a monogamous relationship or to avoid the gay ghetto entirely—or even to go back into the closet.
In fact, the 70’s were filled with men who lived in the big cities where the sexual revolution was unfolding but who did not participate in this world of casual or anonymous sex. In 1979, as the Village People were releasing their smash hit Macho Man, a song which in many ways reflected the sexual mores of gay men’s lives in the 70’s, a group of gay men from New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco was traveling to New England to found the Men’s Music Collective. Explained one of the group’s co-founders: “This is not music that glorifies male superiority and machismo. It’s music of men learning to grow beyond narrow sex-role definitions.” Unlike those interviewed for Gay Sex in the 1970s, many gay men in this era did not see unbridled sex as the capstone of gay liberation. The founders of the Men’s Music Collective had roots in the feminist movement and worked assiduously to carve out a cultural and creative space that remained separate from the world of unrestricted sex.
Focusing only on anonymous sex on Chelsea piers, as the documentary Gay Sex in the 70’s does, also perpetrates a certain historical problem in that it links gay liberation exclusively to New York—specifically a New York in which liberation was equated with casual sex. Gay, a newspaper from 1970, reports on an openly gay University of Minnesota student named Jack Baker who was elected president of the student body and sees his win as “definitely a victory for gay liberation.” Next to this report is an article under the headline: “A Sado-Masochism Spokesman Tells It Like It Is.” This juxtaposition symbolizes the way in which sex and politics intersected and were both part of the era’s narrative. What’s more, throughout the 70’s discussions about sex ranged quite broadly and included such topics as the relationship between sadomasochism and psychiatry, the transition from being a married man to a sexually active gay man, and the anxiety and withdrawal that many gay couples faced in the bedroom.
The emphasis on the outlandish sexual exploits of some gay men in the 70’s prevents us from understanding the rich and often untold history of gay life in that decade. Take, for example, the current obsession with gay marriage. Based on contemporary coverage of same-sex marriage, one could justly assume that this issue emerged in the early 1990’s, at a time when various gay activist groups began to embrace traditional notions of equality. But in 1971, as many gay men were cruising in back rooms, 35 gay couples celebrated their engagement at the Marriage License Bureau in New York City. Yet the story of Father Robert Clement of the Church of the Beloved Disciple, who spearheaded this political action, is often lost in the historical record amid salacious stories of gay men negotiating abandoned warehouses like cats in search of prey.
Representations of gay men always on the prowl suggest that the 1970’s was a period of political decline in the gay community, sandwiched between the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the activism of the 1980’s in response to AIDS. But this is far from the case. In New York City in 1973, for example, when Herman Badillo, the first person of Puerto Rican origin to be elected to the U.S. Congress, was running for mayor, reporters at GAY interrogated Badillo on his policies toward gay men and women. They did not ask questions about police raids of bars or cruising spots, but pushed him on how he would treat gays and lesbians as citizens. Badillo responded by “vowing to open the city for Blacks, Spanish-speaking ethnic groups, sexual minorities, and youth.” As the decade was drawing to a close, in 1978, local gay groups successfully pressured Mayor Koch to declare the third week of June as “Lesbian and Gay Pride Week.”
In Gay Sex in the 70s, one of the characters talks about his involvement in political groups, but the filmmakers have downplayed his political engagement and focused far more on his sex life. They also highlight his fascination with Hollywood films and campy musicals, but suggest that his new-found interest in the arts was only a response to the onslaught of AIDS. And, while this might be true for this particular gay man, surely the filmmakers don’t want to imply that gay men’s interest in the arts only began with the epidemic! The men we do encounter in the film are mostly white macho studs who could have been porn stars, rather than the legions of men who, because of their looks, their race, their class, or their age, were not part of this fast-track world.
Framing gay sex in the 70’s within the broader context of U.S. history reveals how similar this polemic is to other interpretations of the past. Periods of economic and cultural decline, such as the Great Depression in the 1930’s, are typically told as the inevitable consequence of the previous era’s financial recklessness and moral turpitude. In the end it’s the old biblical story of paradise interrupted when mankind commits a crime against God, and the ineluctable punishment that ensues. In the version of this latest morality play, Stonewall is depicted as the period of virtuous innocence followed by a period of eating, nay devouring, the forbidden fruit, followed by the punishment of AIDS.
In Gay Sex in the 70s, there are many shots showing gay men crowded in trucks or on piers having sex like animals—sometimes even in the presence of urine, feces, and other barnyard elements (including grunts). Is this to suggest that the majority of the sex between men that took place in the 70’s took place in dark alleys or in filthy backrooms? And is this really what the men of this era meant by “sexual liberation”? But, of course, the whole point of the movie is not to reveal sex as it was actually practiced by all the humdrum gay men who didn’t spend their nights cruising the Chelsea piers or the Mineshaft, but instead to illustrate how the sexual excesses of the gay community led it to the brink of annihilation. What’s unfortunate is that gay writers and filmmakers, even those who ought to know better, have bought into the dominant narrative that gay men themselves are responsible for the spread of HIV and thus, in some undeniable sense, receiving their just desserts.
* Later cited in The Long Road to Freedom, edited by Mark Thompson. St. Martins Press, 1994.
Jim Downs, a lecturer in history at Princeton, is co-author of Taking Back the Academy: History of Activism, History as Activism.
