Panel Examines Gay Life in the ’70s
The title says it all "The Vanishing City: The Golden Age of Gay." Actually, author Brad Gooch said it pretty well in his book title, "The Golden Age of Promiscuity." Because, according to a panel that was (mostly) there, that was what the 1970s were like, at least in New York City in the 1970s.
Artist Robert Richards, whose well-known erotica is included in museum collections, hosted the event, at Dixon Place, a performance space tucked into Downtown Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The event, part of the Hot festival, took place on July 13, and also included Eliot Hubbard, the director of Reno Sweeney’s, a famous Greenwich Village cabaret where Baby Jane Dexter, another panelist, often performed.
Also on hand was Bob Alvarez, a prominent director of gay male porn in the day, and Randy Jones, the cowboy in the gayest disco group of the ’70s (or any era), the Village People. Bringing up the rear (!) was a young’un, Aaron Tilford, the publisher of Spunk magazine.
Richards, one of New York’s most beloved artists and stylish bon
vivants, took the audience on a whirlwind journey that was meant to show the typical gay man’s day who had the luck to be living in the Village during the hedonistic late 1970s, just before the crisis descended. Richards took us with our Mr. Gay as cruises the streets; visits bars, porn shops, discos,
gallery openings, porn movie houses; and then explores the notorious Meatpacking District and abandoned piers.
The first photo on the wall above Richards expressed it all: The old West Side piers, just before they were torn down. These were the infamous dilapidated Hudson River loading docks that were used by gay men at night for anonymous sexual encounters -- the more, the merrier.
"In the late ’60s and early ’70s, we were open to all kinds of experimentation," Alvarez said. "There’s less openness today. Everyone is trying to be middle class." Alvarez had his personal "road to Damascus" when he was "Boys in the Sand," the landmark 1971 gay porn film that was seriously reviewed and ushered in the age of porno chic.
"I had just gotten into underground films," like the landmark 8 mm’s of Andy Warhol, Alvarez said. "’Boys in the Sand’ proved we were no longer in Kansas." When he made his own film, he couldn’t show it at the 55th Street Playhouse, because "Sand" was still playing. So he booked the Little Carnegie, an art house attached to and associated with New York’s most prestigious classical music venue, Carnegie Hall.
Back in those more innocent times, even the New York Times accepted ads for gay porn films. The film played until some little old ladies wandered into the Little Carnegie. But there were several porno houses in those pre-VCR days, such as the Eros, Adonis, Gaiety, Bijoux and Elgin. (Richards commented that the advent of the VCR may have been as revolutionary as the telephone, since it allowed viewing porn to become a solitary experience.)
For his part, Hubbard related the hilarious story of the Andy Warhol transvestite "superstar" Holly Woodlawn, who was arrested at her opening at Reno Sweeney. Apparently, she had been going around town impersonating the wife a United Nations ambassador. "Where would she be taken?" he remembers wondering. The Tombs were the infamous prison for men; the Women’s House of Detention (right in the heart of Greenwich Village on Sixth Avenue and West 10th Street, where the Jefferson Library is now) was for women.
Cabaret legend Baby Jane Dexter recalled being with Hubbard, some other performers and Reno Sweeney booker Judith Cohen when an armed robber came in after hours to take the till. "Take me!" Cohen exclaimed. "They’re all artists!"
Hubbard also recalled being arrested at an after-hours bar in the Village the year before Stonewall with a mixed (gay-straight, male-female) but mostly gay crowd. Back then, being arrested simply for being gay and being in a bar was not unusual.
That prompted Randy Jones to bring up the famous pre-Stonewall sit-in at Julius, the much more button-down bar around the corner from the bar where the modern gay liberation movement started. Only a few years before, a few men in suits sat at the bar with a news photographer in tow and demanded to be served.
The each told the bartender that he was gay. The bartender took away the drinks. The photographer recorded it. Within a week, the law that gay men could not be served in bars was history.
"I came to New York City from North Carolina," said Jones, who still looks studly and still wears Western garb these many years later. He quickly fell in with a circle of very gay-friendly Upper East Side ladies, including Jerry Hall (a one-time Mrs. Mick Jagger), Grace Jones and Janet Dickerson. Jones got an album deal soon after, and the advent of Studio 54 helped make her and others into stars.
"We witnessed profound changes," Jones said -- everything from Stonewall to women wearing pantsuits. Not the least of those changes was the sex, which was everywhere, available everywhere and going on everywhere.
All of the panelists commented on how easy sex was in the day. Not only in the bathhouses, or the piers, or the movies, or the bars (like the Mineshaft and the Anvil). But pick-ups on the street, in restaurants, in libraries. Everywhere.
More innocent times, indeed.
