New York City piers in the 1970s

That picture is worth a thousand words...

I usually found someone to fuck before I made it all the way to the piers. Jefferson Market was a good place, as well as 9th, 10th, and 11th Streets.

Guys really walked around the piers bareassed like that in broad daylight?

I don’t think that was daylight, R3.

The flashbulb probably created the light.

So there was a giant flashbulb to the right of the guy without pants?

And the picture was taken from behind him? Was there a giant klieg light involved?

I think it was daylight.

They had just been torn down when I moved there - late 80s. Symbolizes to me the wreckage of that whole lifestyle. All that was left was rickety old wooden piers that were closed off - but we still walked on them. It was the time of the Paris is Burning crowd - no one bothered anybody. Then it got made into a glamorous park and now it’s swarming with straights and closed to the poor.

Disgusting whores who all died of HIV/AIDS. Hope they enjoyed those empty trysts devoid of any real meaning...

It can be summed up in two words: Squats, bitch!

R5 has never taken a flash photo in a dark room.

R2. Jefferson Market. Damn. That brought me back. I messed around with a cute butcher from there circa 1995. His bf (he never told me about that) listened to a voicemail I left him and called me at work incessantly. Not cool. But the butcher was fun and sexy. Wonder where the hell he is these days.

Who used to go there? I know next to nothing about the piers, so please let's have more background info.

So tired of the homophobic slut shaming. Bitch, this is datalounge!

Tales of anonymous sex are welcome. How much HIV do you think was lurking in there?

Jefferson Market? No such place on google maps.

A bunch of seals sunning themselves!

NYC attractions

What a judgmental bunch!

R13 - I’m pretty sure R10 is referring to Chelsea Market... 15 St and 9th Av. The docks are two blocks west. Dark, dank and sleazy area back in the 70s. Now, gentrified BEYOND affordability.

R13. Jefferson Market was on Sixth and about 10 th Street. On the east side of Sixth. Just up from Balducci’s. Gone now. It was kind of the second stop after Balduccis. At Balduccis you got great vegetables, condiments etc. At Jefferson, they had awesome cuts of meat and seafood.

R18. I’m r10 and 13. I was commenting on R2 who referred to Jefferson market. Not Chelsea market. Although I love Chelsea market. Yes, Jefferson market was further east but still on the edge of the village. And sort of that seedy Sixth Avenue edge.

But those piers were never as decrepit, wooden and useless as this Piers. Talk about ‘always open’ hole on Piers...

I know that you are primarily asking about the sex, but there was also a flourishing of street art that occurred there too, especially in the early 80s. And some like Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz combined both. Here’s a fully available gallery catalogue with beautiful photographs and essays about a productive period of creation there.

Also, I don’t know if you watched the HBO series The Deuce, but they had a few sexy scenes sex on the piers, in a think just the last season you may want to check out. The series is know for its attention to period detail.

Look at all these transplants

I had no idea about the artwork, R22. Thanks so much for your post.

Here’s some super 8 archival film.

Here’s an historic overview.

[quote]Jefferson Market was on Sixth and about 10th Street. On the east side of Sixth.

And prior to that, it was on the west side of Sixth Avenue, between 10th and 11th. It was where I ate my first rotisserie chicken. The Jefferson Market Library is still there, at the corner of 10th and 6th.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the library was once a police precinct, and Stonewall protesters were imprisoned there after the riot. I recall reading about someone wanting to jump out the window, and die from landing on the spikes that surrounded the perimeter, rather than be prosecuted as a homosexual. Or was that a fictitious account?

R27 - close but no. Jefferson Market was a courthouse and WOMENS prison. The prison that was attached to it was knocked down and is now a garden but was visible in pictures of the area in the 60s.

The arrests at the time of Stonewall - and the prior arrests at a bar on 10th street where the guy jumped and was impaled - would have been taken to the Charles St police precinct between Washington and Greenwich. That precinct building is now condos and they built a new precinct building on 10th street. You can still see the spikes at the old precinct building.

R7 how are you still hissing? Fear, hatred and bitterness turned you into a ghastly witch decades ago.

Is this like the dick dock in p-town?

Jefferson Market guy here. Thanks for the history. You guys amaze me sometimes

^ oh. And a MARY moment at Jefferson Market..... stood next to Cher once in the checkout line!!!

These “stories” are lame. Just make something up man.

Thanks for your input, Miss Jacqueline Susann at R33.

I want to hear about the trucks in the Meatpacking District. How the hell did that whole thing work?

How many piers were there, i'm assuming they're gone but what's there now?

Missed its cultural moment but the bf and i made out on the piers in the mid 80s just to pay tribute to its place in our history

[quote] Guys really walked around the piers bareassed like that in broad daylight?

Yes, Virginia.

See R26's link: "The dilapidated structures – including Pier 45 (known as the Christopher Street Pier) opposite West 10th Street, and piers 46, 48, and 51 – were reappropriated as a destination for gay men to sunbathe naked, cruise, and have public sex by the early 1970s."

Piers 40, 45 and 46 are still there.

A bar owner Chuck Dima who ran Badlands on the corner of Christopher and West, and who founded the Big Apple Softball Apple League told me that at least once a week a murder victim was pulled from the waters around the piers.

Did you just present hole and get schtuped?

[quote] Guys really walked around the piers bareassed like that in broad daylight?

I've been there many times back in the day. It was a no-go zone for cops, etc. So, yes guys would walk around bareassed all the time or sunbathe on the outer pier naked.

[quote] Jefferson Market. Damn. That brought me back. I messed around with a cute butcher from there circa 1995. His bf (he never told me about that) listened to a voicemail I left him and called me at work incessantly. Not cool. But the butcher was fun and sexy. Wonder where the hell he is these days.

R10 Were you hooking up with the butcher on the piers or in more salubrious surroundings?

[quote] Did you just present hole and get schtuped?

R10? R42?

No one has or will ever touch R7 except in disgust and with a twenty in her pocket.

I curse R7 to receive her contractual comeuppance in a small, dark room.

I don't believe in curses.

I have a paving stone from the gay beach pier. Collected it just before the demolition crews moved in.

R43. I had seen him a couple of time at Jefferson Market. Cute guy. Then one night saw him at that old gay bar just off Sixth called Pieces. Cheesy bar. But there he was and we struck up a conversation. Screwed around at my place on West 11th Street and a few times at his place. He had a cute ass.

It always bothered me that the pier numbers didn’t match up with the street numbers, way to complicate things!

[quote]He had a cute ass.

...but he couldn’t live forever. Or did he?

They did at one time, r49. But then the tide shifted the island of Manhattan a little south and fucked things up.

R50. Good question. I have no clue what he is up to. Sometimes I wonder about those fleeting flings. Alive? Dead? DLer?

The naked guy in OP's photo looks like he was sporting a Dorothy Hamil hair-do. Not sexy.

And then they all died. The End

Apparently not, r54, since some of them are posting here.

But you weren’t just being an asshole.

R35 It was an overnight truck parking area in lower Manhattan next to the meat-packing district and, like the piers, pretty much a sexual free-for-all every night. Many of the trucks (these were short cubes, not tractor trailers) were locked, but many empty ones were not and thus accessible for sex, either by a pair or by the truckload, and pretty much out of sight. It was a convenient and potentially even private place (pull down the rear door) to fuck and both pier- and Christopher Street-adjacent so very convenient and, like the piers, very popular.

A friend was an executive at Ryder Truck Rental in the 1970's and had his own Ryder truck parked there, set up comfortably for sex [italic]a deux.[/italic] He sometimes left his street clothes there, had the mattress and clean sheets ready, a cooler and ashtrays, all locked inside ready to go at a moment's notice. It was the ultimate fuck truck. He can't have been the only one to have had exclusive use of a truck - even if you're one in a million, there are eight of you in NYC - but he was the only one I knew who had his own.

And R54, however much it must pain him to be told this, is wrong. Good times and occasionally in someone else's bum times, I've seen 'em all and my dear, I'm still here.

Bare-assed homeboy in OP pic is getting his well-deserved servings of BBC.

I moved to NYC in 1979 at age 21. The warehouse pier at the end of Christopher Street was THE place.....meaning that's where you went if you wanted to have sex during the day, since it was an enclosed building with numerous offices and little side rooms and broken out windows.. It had been unused for years, so interior doors were all gone and there was a large side opening to the main building that admitted lots of light and fresh air - but plenty of rats and bird poop everywhere too. There was a sort of an "entrance". You crossed the West Side Highway at the end of Christopher street and there was a sort of a door there. A steady stream of men went in and out, so there was no doubt about how to get in. I would describe is as a bathhouse with no beds and and no entrance fee. And, like a bathhouse, most people actually just walked and gawked - as I recall you had to watch your step because there were occasional gaps in the flooring and you didn't want to end up in the Hudson. The main building was LONG - it stretched far out into the Hudson - and there wasn't much sexual activity there. It was like a runway. You walked to the end and back checking out the men all along the way. The sexual activity happened mostly on the second floor where there were many offices that had their doors removed. It was there that people got and gave blow jobs primarily - and the occasional exhibitionists would fuck in plain view of all the other "customers". The building smelled like sea air, bird shit and ASS. There were some old gay porn films that showed it in action - in particular, I can picture Daniel Holt having sex there. Maybe it was a scene from "Non-Stop". I can't remember the exact year, but I feel that the warehouse building was torn down in the early-mid-80s, leaving just the pier itself. After that, the only sex there happened at night - but I wouldn't describe that as either safe or frequent. A great place to get pick-pocketed or knifed......

Don't know if this site is virus-free......so AYOR......but it shows Daniel Holt at the pier.

R48 Your butcher boy was obviously a risk-taker: taking you home when he had a bf he didn't tell you about, what was he thinking?

Nice clip R59, thanks. And thanks for the eye-witness account R58: did you visit at lunchtimes, weekends, summer evenings as a rule?

Nice clip R59, thanks. And thanks for the eye-witness account R58: did you visit at lunchtimes, weekends, summer evenings as a rule?

R59 Thanks for that-beautiful clip hot natural men.Yum.

That was hot R59...

How here was a member of the Corduroy Club?

You might be here R56 but how many aren't, you just got lucky.

Girls, it's all in the documentary "Gay Sex in the 1970s". You find it on iTunes.

Btw., how does one link to an URL on Datalounge? I am getting denied when I do that.

Only tangentially related, but was there as much emphasis on "cum" in the 70s as there is today? Were people enamored of the idea of being 'bred' or used as 'cumdumps" and taking as many loads as possible, or is that fetish a more recent phenomenon?

Yes r68. It is a little known fact that cum was invented in 2007.

Cum again?

[quote]Were people enamored of the idea of being 'bred'

I think that's a millennial/internet gay thing, "breeding." Because, you know, one man can't breed another man. But everything has to have a cutesy name now.

Cum took on much greater importance after AIDS. It became a toxic fluid. The stigma exists even in today’s bareback culture - there is an instinctive awareness of the danger.

R68 More recent, I think. For most of us, sex was a lot simpler then - blowjobs and fucking. Reverse cowboy existed, it just didn't have a name.

People might have been cumdumps but it wasn't a thing and what's "breeding" now was cumming and pulling out and hoping you had a paper towel handy back then.

I remember reading that it was almost considered rude to cum in a guy's ass in the 70s, so that he could go about the rest of his day/night and not have to possibly find a bathroom a couple hours later.

R74, Emily Post took quite the stand on this.

Breeding wasn't a thing it seems. In R59's clip the top cums outside and does not stick it back in.

R75. Emily Post’s historic review of the politesse surrounding hanky codes was seminal (pardon the pun). That girl really did her homework.

More stories, please, r58.

I've never heard the name "Daniel Holt" before. Was he equivalent to Jack Wrangler?

R79 They were all cocksuckers, get over it and back on thread.

Daniel Holt was a very handsome, completely versatile porn star of the early 1980s, so of a slightly later vintage than Jack Wrangler. I think he died of AIDS in 1993. NonStop was made in 1983 or 1984. His partner in the film clip at the pier was Steve Collins.

I think the warehouse part of the pier was demolished about 1985. I lived in Chelsea from 1979-1981 and visited the piers fairly often in those two years. more as a voyeur than as a participant, but I'd be lying if I denied ever getting a blow job there. I went a few times after dark, but that was terrifying. I worked weekdays, so I only visited the pier on weekends, but I would say that during nice weather it was consistently busy. Obviously it wasn't used much at all in winter or during inclement weather during other seasons. As in other gay situations of this type, people would try to find a semi-private spot to have sex in, but voyeurs would gather quite quickly, either to try to join in or to JO with other bystanders. I'm linking a few other pictures of the pier during those years below.

"It always bothered me that the pier numbers didn’t match up with the street numbers, way to complicate things!"

That bothers me...

PS one site says that Daniel Holt died of a heart attack after a drug overdose in 1993 - either way, the consensus is that he died that year.

Op - thanks for the thread and the pic. I have enjoyed reading the stories. What an exciting time to have lived in New York. I do wonder where the guy in OP's pic left his others though and if the were securely put away. I am obviously over think this.

AIDS aside, I hope these men got a tetanus shot! It’s all I can think about when I see them. That and sun block.

Did they swim from the piers?

^^ don't know the answer but would guess no. the Hudson was polluted and not somewhere you'd want to swim

I used to lay out on the end of the pier naked with other guys and never saw someone jump in the water

[quote] In R59's clip the top cums outside and does not stick it back in.

Isn’t that clip from a movie? Hardly real life.

If they all pulled out how did AIDS get such a hold?

Because pulling out had nothing to do with it. You’re no safer barebacking and pulling out than you are cumming inside.

I heard the guys they pulled from the water dead were mostly guys who fell through the holes in the pier or off the side - not necessarily murders.

Great thread subject but the thought of rats 🐀 everywhere freaks me out!

Richard Gere used to go there for the gerbils r92

I wouldn't go at night because I was afraid I'd step on a nail sticking out of those old boards and it would go right thru my foot. I think the number of night drownings were exaggerated. A type of urban legend.

Current photo of the Quai d'Austerlitz under the station along the Seine. In the olden times (90s!) none of this was there, just open forgotten space along the river, under the station. Friend of mine fell in when we were cursing one night and it was a mess and not easy to get him out! The things we do for SEX.

You were both wiccans?

Is that why my socks won’t stay up, r95?

Did they ever film any movies there in the Sixties or Seventies? I'm fascinated by gigantic dilapidated spaces like those.

I don't see any reason for nostalgia for this - dangerous, run-down piers where people could fall through the floors, no lighting to watch where you step, criminals waiting to rob you, and all for some seedy anonymous sex.

This is why 911 happened..

Super 8

Aunt Pittypat/ r99: some people actually found the danger exciting, although I know you find that impossible to believe.

[quote] and all for some seedy anonymous sex.

Made it all worth it.

Why do gay men always have to find some filthy disgusting place to hook up? Always near water! Always!

My parents owned a boat that they kept at the Tarrytown marina. One Sunday in the summer, mid 70s, I was on the boat with their friends and their kids (we were all teenagers) and went down the Hudson and my father brought the boat in closer and noted that it was only men on this pier, and then someone else mentioned and they are naked too. My father turned the boat around so fast it is amazing someone didn't go overboard. The following Sunday, I ventured into the Village (from NJ Suburbs) and located this pier and couldn't believe all the nudity and rampant sex going on in the middle of the day. It was like stepping into a gay Caligula set. I entered NYU the following year and never looked back.

[quote] The following Sunday, I ventured into the Village

You skipped church I suppose. How did you manage that?

R85 wins

Actually, R99 wins the Prisspottery award, and R85 is runner up.

The Trucks

On a rainy day my shop smells like cum

So, for the trucks, why didn't the owners start locking the trucks up? You would think it would get old cleaning the cum and poppers and god knows what else out of the back of your truck every morning?? I always assumed that these were abandoned semi trailers, not trucks in regular use as described above...

Always make sure to well cook your steak as you just don't know where it's been.

Oh Stella (R110) What a lovely gift they have left you. But however did you recognize the scent?

"Even if you're one in a million, there are eight of you in NYC" -- Love this, R56. Do you come up with it or is it a common expression in NYC?

did*

It might have been a wonderful and thrilling time but it still wasn't worth the price paid in the end.

Was there fisting going on?

Stevie Sondheim punched many assholes in the trucks

He has an unpublished musical about it.

It's called "Roseboud! Oh, Rosebud!"

R114: I have no idea. I know I’ve used the phrase for a while because I remember saying there are “seven of you” and was reminded that there are now eight million people there.

Actually, the trucks I remember were all parked cheek-by-jowl directly underneath the old elevated railroad that is now the Highline. People didn't go IN the trucks for the most part, but had sex between or behind the trucks. although some were unlocked. The trucks always seemed to be parked in such a way that they were two or three deep and arranged like bricks in a wall so that you couldn't see down a gap between them more than one truck length.. Also, they were only parked that way at night, not during the day, so the trucks were a sexual playground of the night, not of the daytime. (Another place where pick pockets worked with impunity). More than once I heard someone exiting saying something like "be careful, someone back there just stole my wallet". The trans people of old also tried their luck there, so it wasn't unusual to see a masculine form in a bustier on his/her way uptown where truckers stayed active later into the evening. All of this came to an end (more or less) in the mid-80s.

Fascinating stuff, r122.

Thanks.

r22 thank you! I thought no one remembered them anymore, David particularly. Maybe I'm just feeling apocalyptically cynical right now.

I'd recommend his bio, A Fire in the Belly, & his own Close to the Knives. Not so much about the sex, but more about the art scene around the Piers.

^^And the photos of his boyfriend, Peter Hujar.

Erna learned most of her life skills in those trucks. No rubbers! Legs in the air!

Hindsight makes all of this seem crazy and exciting. Some posters said that this place was still popular into the mid-80s. How long did it take for people to find out about AIDs or at least the cause? I'm a millennial, so I thought it would be like COVID-19, nothing then bam, everyone (in the urban gay communities) is aware of something terrible that's being passed around.

I understand being horny but when your friends are dying it sounds like a complete turn off.

[quote] I'm a millennial, so I thought it would be like COVID-19, nothing then bam, everyone (in the urban gay communities) is aware of something terrible that's being passed around.

Close, but not quite. What we knew in the very beginning was that gay guys were getting a cancer that was predominantly seen in older Jewish men, who also didn’t usually die from it. No one at first knew how, why, how it was transmitted, or a host of other things like we’re doing now to stem COVID.

Once it became apparent it was transmitted sexually, I think the idea was, “yeah, but this guy looks healthy, so he’s ok. He doesn’t have it.” Big mistake.

At one time we were advised to only hook up with “healthy looking people”! Similar to COVID, that’s no indication at all of someone’s health.

Thank you r128 that makes sense. I guess a lack of government action, and no internet for global information sharing, could lead to years of misinformation. I truly appreciate your response.

The HIV virus was first identified in the early summer of 1985, if I remember right, and A. Fauci had something to do with that. Prior to that, people thought that AIDS was likely an air-transmissible illness, like covid19. People who were hospitalized were in isolation units, separated from people by plastic sheeting. A friend of mine's older brother was Case No. 784, died in 1982 or 1983, I can't recall. The younger brother died from the same thing at the end of 1993.

Didn't Ronald Regan wait something like two years before even uttering the words "HIV/AIDS"?

He ignored it completely for as long as he could. I hope he and his filthy wife are both roasting in Hell.

Reagan's Press Secretary was caught on tape actually making fun of a reporter for asking if the administration was at all concerned.

Here is some of what R133 is talking about.

Since HIV transmission was similar in pattern to Hepatitis B most intelligent people believed it was virus transmitted by body fluids very early on. No reputable person believed it was air borne. We didn't need to identify the actual virus to figure this out. Otherwise why develop safe sex guidelines.

Has anyone heard the conspiracy theory that the Hep-B vaccines of the late 70s were actually that and also an HIV Trojan horse?

There were no safe sex guidelines until 1985, when the virus was isolated. And "reputable" or not, the doctors at St. Vincent's certainly did suspect that it was transmissible through the air. My friend's brother died there, behind a barrier of plastic painting tarps, physically isolated from all contact, and so did the other hundreds who were the first to die there and in other hospitals all over the country. Keep talking about something you know nothing about.

The piers were amazing. You had miles of dick to choose from. It was here that I saw first hand that Black men had been given reparations by GOD for they all seemed to have larger dicks than the White men! I became a fan at 17.

Why are there so many threads on the Westside Piers and the trucks and none on the The Ramble? It was still pretty active in the late 90s. I almost got arrested there not long after they nabbed that poor Swissair pilot and kept him in jail overnight, those mean pigs. The airline had to cancel the flight. So, share some Ramble stories, boys!

Shouldn't you start another thread, R139?

R137, in 1983 the virus was isolated by the French. In 1983 the same month a publication came out on safe sex. The ideas were floating around earlier because most gay men and scientists accepted the viral transmission theory. This was two years after the first reports of Aids symptoms in the CDC reports. What you are describing is an early brief panic response by drs treating AIDS patients. Gay activists moved quickly beyond that to neutralize homophobia and AIDS phobia. I was there you stupid person.

Read this moron

I saw a website once...it's possible. Another moron weighs in.

Haven't they found an AIDS death dating back to 1969? The guy who died was a black teen hustler.

R124. The retrospective of David W.'s career and art at the Whitney was extraordinary--I drove fours to see it--it was well-worth the drive. His burning hous was used as the basis for the poster art for the recent, aborted revival of Who's Afraid of VW. Both as a visual artist and a writer,NYE was amazing. Hu jar was equally gifted in his own medium and style.

R143 - don't you know AIDS was a revenge by the white devil against Yacub? The white race was grafted from blacks, by the black bushman scientist Yacub as biological biological warfare against black africans. I guess he was a self hater. It was 6 thousand years ago. Then the white race got made that the blacks, who are superior but kept inferior, got uppity. Kind of like the coming robot revolution.

I came to NYC in 1990. At the end of Christopher Street, alongside the dock, there was an embankment that went down to the water. Guys used to have sex behind the embankment.

Does anyone know if the Highline was accessible at that time? I know that it was an abandoned railroad, but did guys go up there or was there no access?

[quote] It was still pretty active in the late 90s. I almost got arrested there not long after they nabbed that poor Swissair pilot and kept him in jail overnight, those mean pigs. The airline had to cancel the flight.

I didn't hear that story. How did they nab the guy? Was it an undercover cop?

The Ramble is still going, but the atmosphere has changed. When I first started going there, you could see a group of guys all having sex with one another. Part of the fun was watching and being watch. Now if you stop to watch someone, they'll get nasty and tell you to move on. It's like why are you having sex in the middle of a park in the middle of Manhattan if you don't want people to watch you?

Thanks R148, that made my night.

Here is the link, R150.

Whores ruin everything.

Best song about the piers.

I went to the piers only once if I recall correctly. I remember being shocked at seeing places where the wood had rotted and realizing that somebody could fall right through into the Hudson River. In the daytime, guys went to lay out and that's what I was doing there with my friend. But we were all aware that there was sex to be had. But I was only 20 and did not seek it out. And I never went back. The early 80's were wild in NYC.

r90 that is an absolute lie. But you know that, don't you.

At that same time I lived in San Francisco. We were also big whores there too. Almost all of the parks day and night. And most of the bars in the south of Market area. Life was much more simple then.

There was an element of danger associated with all the outdoor sex at that time, even though it was rampant. There was always the chance that you could be arrested, robbed, or knifed. It added to the excitement of it all.

R157, maybe start a thread about SF. This thread is about the NYC piers.

a great feeling of getting away from it all walking through those piers / cruising ..., although i knew the potential of getting mugged.. it never felt particularly dangerous during the day. i remember jogging along the elevated highway that was closed, and looking inside the 2nd floor windows at guys getting it on. as for bodies being pulled weekly from the water, i don't think they were directly related to the gay scene, not my memory.

R156, you can’t be serious.

You really believe that pulling out before cumming reduces the risk of getting HIV? We’re not talking about not trying to get some high school chick pregnant.

The difference with AIDS was that it took a long time to kill you, especially once they had Bactrim to treat the terrible AIDS pneumonia. Coronavirus can kill in 5 days, but the mortality rate over all is much lower. AIDS until 1996 killed 95% of infected people, but nearly all over a period of years.

'Doctors and nurses say elderly patients and those with underlying health conditions are not the only ones who appear relatively well one moment and at death’s door the next. It happens to the young and healthy, too.

Patients “look fine, feel fine, then you turn around and they’re unresponsive,” said Diana Torres, a nurse at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, the center of the nation’s worst outbreak. “I’m paranoid, scared to walk out of their room.”

[Quote] Patients “look fine, feel fine, then you turn around and they’re unresponsive,” s

Is she talking about seemingly in recovery and then they "go under" again?

Wrong thread, R163.

Torres was talking about AIDS patients?

R25 Beautiful! Thank you!

There was no internet when AIDS came around. As a kid coming out, you couldn’t even talk about being gay, never mind how you got AIDS. Complete absence of information. By 1984, there was a pamphlet or poster in the gay bars - if you went there. Non-out guys who hooked up in public spaces would have had no information - especially outside of NYC.

In the Klaus Nomi documentary someone mentioned that he was a diehard fan of the trucks. He died a horrid death from AIDS.

As opposed to the other deaths from AIDS?

[quote] The difference with AIDS was that it took a long time to kill you,

And, in the beginning at least, it took a long time to find out you were positive, unless you were proactive and got tested, which was relatively rare because to test positive was a death sentence.

So, not being “sick,” not getting tested and carrying on as though everything were normal helped spread the disease that much more.

Pertinent comparison to the present virus - testing was critical to starting to manage it. With CV, you know in 1-2 weeks. With AIDS, it took 2-5 years. And testing didn’t exist until 4-5 years into the plague.

The other critical difference - AIDS killed almost everyone infected. CV kills 1-2%. So ultimately incomparable.

Someone needs to let viruses know everyone thinks they're assholes then maybe they'll knock this shit off.

Eh, that didn’t stop the bullies in my high school, r172, so I doubt it’ll work here.

We can try it though.

Why did a nice thread about free-spirited gay sex in the 1970s turn into a discussion about viruses? They were young and they were free and I like to think of them in this moment rather than what was to come later for most of them.

Sadly the meat truck and pier lifestyle enabled AIDS to spread like wildfire.

R85: That reminds me I gotta update my tetanus vaccine. And some of us don' really need too much sunblock. When I was younger in my 20's I spent a week or two down at Daytona, Beach. Shirtless of course. Not only do I have the Mediterranean trait of being very hairy, I also have the trait where I turn brown with a little bit of sun exposure. Not red, brown.

I miss those days.

A smorgasbord of men, hot sex and often great conversations, and some wonderful friendships.

It was GREAT except for one afternoon I was there. We heard this wretched screeching sound coming from inside and went to go look... well, in a few seconds we were gagging and throwing up everywhere. It became apparent that DL legend Erna (Michael) was visiting and had found a group of homeless men to “feed her some fudge”... took days for the water to wash that mess away.

It's difficult to describe how much fun NYC was in the 70's, before AIDS. A fantasy playground.

oh what a paradise it seemed.

Some of you guys don't really remember the start of AIDS, which hit the newspapers in the summer of 1981. A cluster of gay men on the west coast, CDC report. "Gay cancer" for a while called GRID. Gay Related Immune Deficiency. It did kill people relatively quickly (like a year or two or three, depending). Limit your sex partners, we were told. We soon learned that, despite the stigma, it was transmitted in a very specific way (or ways_.

Met my now husband in the winter of 1980-1981. He got tired of me getting treated for STDs, and I stopped fooling around. Saved my fucking life.

Lesson for COVID, which is very different and far more contagious and community-spread. Behave yourselves. Fucking white party idiots.

PS: and I was a very big whore in the 1970s. Loved it, good times. No regrets, loved the tea rooms, baths, backrooms, trails in parks, etc. But, heeded the message (with encouragement). Still here.

r182 this is what I fear about prep. Gen-Z may be in for a rude awakening. I'm about to get on it myself, but I was born in the 90s so safe sex was drilled into my head. No point in stoping now, but Prep can act like The Pill incase a condom breaks or I have a slip up.

Pretty sure that many of those pier hoes were early victims of AIDS.

If you are using condoms you don't need prep. Don't delude yourself, darling.

r184, yes but many, like artist David Wojnarowicz, also had very tough, traumatic lives-usually b/c of growing up gay in bigoted, provincial families. Point being, it wasn't just hooking up at the piers that did them in. Many of those extreme creatives would've died of other causes, even had AIDS never happened. Someone like Basquiat is a perfect example.

"Pretty sure that many of those pier hoes were early victims of AIDS." (r184)

A. Hoes are things that make furrows in gardens.

B. The gay sexual lifestyle in the 60s and 70s was promiscuous whether it included visits to the piers or not. If you read gay literature written in that period, gay people didn't practice monogamy by and large. Most gay men picked up their sexual partners are bars, at bathhouses, at bookstores, or just walking down the streets in cities like New York and San Francisco, and never gave a thought to it as a moral choice. It's what gay people did and it was considered a vital part of gay liberation and sexual self-expression. Gay people reserved "judgmentality" for those who practiced more extreme varieties of sexual expression - scat, fisting, pissplay, B & D, etc. Simple oral and anal sex were considered vanilla activities. Obviously people would have considered other choices if they had known there was something deadly out there that couldn't be cured by a shot of penicillin, but that uncurable "something" didn't make its appearance in a noticeable way until 1980.. So huge numbers of gay men died in the 80s and early 90s, most of whom had never crossed the threshhold of the Christopher Street Pier.

^^^hoe!

My, what a witty rejoinder, r188.

Those who survived, were very lucky.

R190: Those of us who survived lost almost everyone we knew and loved. Yes, we were lucky but it can be lonely, too.

Wisdom born of pain

R187 More stories of being gay in New York and AIDS, please. Reading about it all is fascinating.

[quote] The gay sexual lifestyle in the 60s and 70s was promiscuous whether it included visits to the piers or not. If you read gay literature written in that period, gay people didn't practice monogamy by and large. Most gay men picked up their sexual partners are bars, at bathhouses, at bookstores, or just walking down the streets in cities like New York and San Francisco, and never gave a thought to it as a moral choice.

I don't think that that was true for most gay men. For one thing, most gay men even then did not live in NY or SF.

I share your skepticism, R193, because lots of people weren't living in NYC or San Francisco or in similar places where the lifestyle R187 describes existed. It wasn't the reality for all the gays who lived there then, either. But there were enough of the people described, with myriad opportunities to connect and all clustered together, to create the kind of virus-spreading - slower, though - we're seeing with Covid-19 now. And like now, plenty of people came and went from the other places, indulging themselves in the fleshpots for a few days or nights and bringing something deadly home that wasn't apparent for months or years.

We didn't have to organize anything or scroll through a hundred profiles in the '70s. You just went wherever you knew there'd be other horny guys, indoors or outdoors, and had sex assuming you saw something you liked and they you. You might have someone's name and number written on a book of matches and you might call them for second go, but you might have preferred something different that night instead. Or maybe you did both. The plague not having come and with seemingly everything curable by antibiotics there was no sense of danger. Sadly, that time coincided with the wider acceptance and use of recreational drugs, too, likely causing more risky behavior.

For those who were sexually active then, it was like a buffet. Some people go to a buffet and have a meal. Some people treat it as an "all you can eat" opportunity. Living then, in urban areas, offered an awful lot more opportunities (and so temptations ) to have casual sex with strangers and some people indulged more freely than others.

[quote]Those who survived, were very lucky.

Ehhh...they didn't have to live through the online era. Life was better then in oh, so many ways.

And they didn't have to social distance.

Great post, r194!

Enjoyed reading it and, to a lesser extent living it.

[quote]Here’s some super 8 archival film.

Thanks, that was fun to watch. Since it was shot in 1976, I wonder if any of those folks are still alive, I am sure the younger ones are. I wonder where they are and how are they doing.

Every single day stories and pictures of individuals who died from AIDS are posted on the FB Group, The Aids Memorial. The short write ups are anniversary memorials from survivors -- family, friends, and even lovers. The stories are often moving, and many of the faces are unforgettable, from the famous to the almost forgotten, starting in the 80s and running to the present.

Powerful, r198. Really powerful.

The most powerful, poignant and well written account of the death of a beloved partner from AIDs is Borrowed Time by the screenwriter Paul Monette, who later died of AIDS himself. Set in West Hollywood in the mid 80s.

It's graphic and upsetting when it comes to the myriad symptoms and indignities Paul's lover of ten years, Roger - a lawyer - suffered.

Extract from Borrowed Time. Roger has been admitted to hospital with an AIDs related brain infection. The doctors attempt to treat it.

Amphotericin B is administered with Benadryl in order to avoid convulsions, the most serious possible side effect. It was about nine or ten when they started the drug in his veins, and I sat by the bed as nurses streamed in and out.

A half hour into the slow drip, the nurse monitoring the IV walked out, saying she’d be right back, and a couple of minutes later Roger began to shake. I gripped him by the shoulders as he was jolted by what felt like waves of electric shock, staring at me horror-struck.

Though Dr Cope would tell me later, trying to ease the torture of my memory, that “mentation” is all blurred during convulsions, I saw that Roger knew the horror of it.

The drug doesn't work:

I was telling the nurse about what a kind and giving man he was, about our life together—when suddenly out of nowhere Roger began to breathe strangely. Deep heaving breaths, expelled with explosive release. I could see the nurse’s face go pale.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Not good,” she replied fearfully, running out of the room. The curious helpless breathing continued, like a storm inside him, while I sat there utterly still. Then six or eight different people rushed in, all the interns and the nurses off the floor. They stared at him and jabbered at each other in their own terrible shorthand.

Finally one of them turned to me. “Is there a living will? What do you want us to do?”

Nothing. Because that is the point of the living will he’d signed, that we couldn’t take him to intensive care and put a tube down his throat. The breathing had leveled out, but his temp was shooting up, and they expected heart failure at any moment. What had happened was that the meningitis had crept to a certain watermark in his brain, and the terrible breathing—Cheyne-Stoking, it’s called—was the start of the final drowning.

An earlier excerpt - Roger loses his eyesight permanently in two hours due to a herpes infection.

I remember driving down the freeway, grilling Rog about what he could see. It seemed to be less and less by the minute. He could barely see the cars going by in the adjacent lanes.

Twenty minutes later we were in Dr Dell’s office, and with all the urgent haste to get there we didn’t really stop to reconnoiter till we were sitting in the examining room. I asked the same question—what could he see?—and now Roger was getting more upset the more his vision darkened.

I picked up the phone to call his sister Jaimee, and bythe time she answered the phone in Chicago he was blind. Total blackness, in just two hours. He didn’t cry out, not then. He was too staggered to howl like Lear, and all I remember is a whimpered “Oh,” repeated over and over.

Then Dell came in and examined the eye and said as calmly as he could that indeed the retina had detached. As the two of us choked on nothingness, he put in a swift call to Kreiger, and they talked about scheduling an immediate reattachment. Dell had nineteen other patients waiting, and there was nothing else he could do. He said he was sorry and left, looking helpless.

We sat there stunned, clinging to each other’s hands. I think I tried to pull out of it and focus on the operation, but neither of us could think at all as we tottered forth from the suite, me leading my friend as he groped a hand in front of him. The nurses’ faces were tight with pain.

Did the Monette-Horwitzes contract HIV at the piers, r200 r201 r202 r203?

I read the book about a decade ago, and cried, too. IIRC, Monette had a one weekend affair around 1980 or so, and thought that was maybe how it was contracted.

But we now know that the infection was dormant for years, so who knows.

Paul and Roger had an open relationship but Paul was far more of a slut than Roger. His heart belonged to Roger though, who was his match intellectually. They both adored ancient mythology and trips to Italy and Greece.

Great, another fine thread derailed by someone who is so entranced with the sound of his own voice that he thinks others must love it too.

R207 thinks Paul Monette has taken over the thread.

Article about the piers

I must be in the minority - NYC looks like a sewer in this era, crumbling and filthy.

NYC was definitely a lot more "gritty" in the 70s and 80s than it is now. There was dirt, there was garbage, there were lots of buildings with permanent scaffolding or boarded up windows. However, there was also far more diversity and many many more people of lower to middle income, particularly artists, dancers, musicians, writers, students. There were strange hidden pockets that don't seem to exist anymore. Walking down an industrial street close to the West Side Highway, there might be 3 walkup apartment buildings in a row, 3-4 stories high, randomly scattered about as though dropped there by accident . Who lived there? How did they find their apartments in the middle of all those factories and warehouses? People were bolder then too. At night, walking to the Eagle or the Ramrod, it wouldn't be unusual in the least to see someone in assless chaps and a leather cap, or someone in a leather jacket and a leather jockstrap. Walking on side streets near there, there might be a tiny little parking lot, crammed full of cars during they day but empty at night except for a few dumpsters, and hidden back behind them, a dozen guys jerking off while some muscle leather stud might be getting sucked off or, an equally muscular guy in faded levis and tight white t-shirt might be bent over a dumpster getting fucked by some Latino or black guy with a huge cock. It was Tom of Finland come to life. Now NYC is like Disneyland, and, just like Disneyland, with its thousands of security cams, I doubt there is any corner of the city where clandestine sex acts are unobserved or allowed to continue for very long. That period (late 70s, early 80s) was also the height of the clone era, so gay men went out of their ways to look masculine. White t-shirts and faded levi jeans were practically a uniform. Lots of men wore mustaches, but there were also lots of clean-shaven ones - probably accountants and lawyers by day. Hair was mostly kept short, jeans were tight and the crotch area softened by repeated scrubbing so that every inch of cock and balls could be seen through them. By the mid-late 80s a new-puritanism swept through the gay community because of AIDS. Clothes were worn loose, shorts were down to the knees, designer jeans replaced levis, people dressed and acted a lot more conservatively. No more assless chaps on public streets. It was a sea-change.

Too many clones then too many clones now.

Speaking of Balducci's

Thank you r211, I remember it the same as you.

R211 that was so interesting. I came of age in nyc in the late 90s, and always have a fascination in the nyc gay generation before me. Once around year 2000,I remember some sort of a small gay book shop closed down somewhere over near gaansevoort street, and they threw thousands of gay magazines, porn books, erotic stuff, and gay news articles of the 70s and 80s gay eras out in a dumpster on the street. Wish I would have taken some of them and read them, probably could have learned a lot more about that area. Too bad all that knowledge and history went into a landfill somewhere.

I'm sure a number of posters here, R215, can - and would probably be glad to - send you "thousands of gay magazines, porn books, erotic stuff, and gay news articles of the 70s and 80s" stored in their attics and basements and storage units across America.

There's no market for it in the digital age and otherwise into the dumpsters it goes.

Yeah that stuff just doesn’t really exist anymore. I remember news shops selling magazines with erotic stories that were really sexy in the 1990s. Don’t find those anoymore.

Who wants to read fiction when you can literally see just about anything in porn now! Even FF in broad daylight in SF.

R218 Well, WS and scat on the streets of San Francisco, but I must have missed the fisting...

[quote]There's no market for it in the digital age and otherwise into the dumpsters it goes.

Haha - years ago I packed up about 3 boxes of Blueboy, Honcho, Black Inches, etc and dropped them off at the Salvation Army night repository, lol! Goddam homophobes!

I would love to have some old issues of HONCHO. That was my favorite mag back in the day. Some of those stories and pics!!!

Just another day down at the docks