I am endlessly fascinated by seedy stories from NYC's 1970's and 1980's gay sex life

You have to know that a lot of that behavior came from being criminalized and discriminated for so long. Gay bars were finally legal and you weren't going to get arrested, charged and fired from your life for going to one. People were testing their boundaries - and that was part of the 70's in America for everyone - gay or straight. Straight people had a lot of unorthodox behavior then - key parties, swapping spouses, swingers, etc.

Secondly, a lot of the over the top behavior also came from the psychological scars these men had. The leather scene is dwindling in the gay community - and there's a reason for that. A lot of it is posturing and playing dress up to make themselves feel masculine and tough.

Most of us don't need this anymore.

They didn't get fisted by the anything loads, troll. Fisting was unusual then and it's still not super common now, even though the internet has made it easier to see and hear about it.

You are denigrating gay men by conflating gay identity with disease and fetishistic sex. You are doing this to create strife. For these reasons I'm finally going to block your stupid fake german account.

Do you think such a lifestyle could come back? What if a mineshaft were to open?

I spent part of my teens reading about these seedy stories. The libraries I had access to were well-stocked with topics under “H” for homosexuality or “G” for gay. My first experience with the gay scene in the mid 90s was a let down, based on what I’d built myself up to expect. Lol! “Where are the orgies?!”, was stuck in my psyche. One-night stands came easy and eventually threesome and gang bangs, but it wasn’t as widespread or easy to come by as I was expecting.

There were a lot of bath houses in NYC in the 70s and 80s and they were very busy. There were gay sexually active movie houses like the Adonis in Midtown west and the Jewell in the East Village and the Gaiety strip club in Times Square. This was the era of Studio 54 and Plato's Retreat. Tons of sex.

F&F GermanGayBoris the OP for his usual, homophobic gay bashing.

Incels will always lie to themselves when others are having any kind of fun rather than the misanthropic sport hate that Boris chose to console himself with.

Donald Trump tumbled into the syphilitic abyss and now he has slurred speech, cognitive failure and dementia. Back in the day, The Tangerine Stream used to take Russian mafiarchs by the busload to be pissed on by hookers at casinos and hotels.

Now he just drools like a zombie and shits his pants unless he’s on Adderral making apeshit.

But you never see the OP shaming any Trump family hedonism.

You only see the OP devouring their crap-packed Depends undergarments.

Thank you, very interesting?

…… ALL OF YOU DON’T BE FOOLED 🤡

[quote]The libraries I had access to were well-stocked with topics under “H” for homosexuality or “G” for gay.

Is that the Do Me Decimal System?

Not also under Q for Queer?

I understand OP is a troll account but yes, it is all going on today, google chemsex for example. Between that, PreP, and modern urban living it is perhaps the most hedonistic time in history to be a gay man.

Of course a real German guy would have been to Berlin by now and would know all this.

R2 is absolutely right OP.

There’s an interesting documentary called something like “Gay Sex in the 70’s” or something like that

R11, I’m pretty sure chem sex has been around a long long time. Even in the 1970’s

[quote] You are denigrating gay men by conflating gay identity with disease and fetishistic sex.

Some people, it seems, live to be offended.

I already got the disease, but I missed out on the fetishistic sex, just my luck as usual.

In 1981 I spent the summer in NYC working at the Club Baths at 1st & 1st, and never saw anyone being fisted, not even in the orgy rooms.

I'm the first to admit I dodged a bullet - not just the HIV one, neither. I went to NYU in the early 80's - and the backroom bars, the glory holes, the bathhouses, and, best of all, curious straight NYU students in the Brittany penthouse/rooftop.

Uncle Charlie's, The Ninth Circle, St Mark's bathhouse.

Anonymous sex was the best, it really was. And it was simply there for the taking. I really miss those days.

It was a different sex culture.

GGG is a Karen. He loves to perpetuate stereotypes of gay men. This is what he likes.

R18 Why was anonymous sex the best? Please tell us about the straight guys.

GGG I wouldn’t judge people getting married and having kids when you are an autistic 30 year old virgin.

There was lots of sex in the parks, Central Park Ramble, Riverside Park near Grants Tomb and the Soldiers and Sailors monument day and night. Lots of backroom bars and bookstores for more anonymous encounters.

[quote]The leather scene is dwindling in the gay community

Bless R1's little heart. She's never stepped a foot in Germany.

OP, "busloads" is a gross overstatement.

Very, very, few people were getting fisted at all in those days.

[quote]Some people, it seems, live to be offended.

You can say that again! Jesus: if ever there was a post that showcased the woke psychosis of the current time, R6s is a classic. It's got everything! Someone asks about gay NY of the swinging 70s, and suddenly they're Hitler. I presume the poster lives in a permanent state of heavily medicated psychological siege, rage, and anxiety -- like Hamlet, seeing phantoms everywhere.

[quote]Anonymous sex was the best, it really was. And it was simply there for the taking. I really miss those days.

I can remember being fucked, and not even bothering to turn round to see who it was. You want it? Take it!

To me the most profound change -- I mean REALLY REALLY profound change -- and this is so little spoken of, and it can't be emphasised enough: the sexualisation of the streets -- the erotic electricty that surged as you walked through the streets of a gay ghetto -- has completely vanished, as the ghettos themselves have. It was fucking thrilling! It made you feel utterly alive! You could walk a mere block and get offered multiple visual offers of sex. And everyone's 'basket' was on display in their tiny shorts or 501s, the crotch carefully worn to highlight the bulge, with the keys and hankie telegraphing everything. It was FANTASTIC!!!! Not since Florence in the Renaissance had there been so public male sexual display. No wonder Camille Paglia feels like so many of us: that we've gone backwards, and the life-enhancing, burning, thrilling Dionysian quality that infused gay life has been lost to a bourgeois sex-denying mentality.

The other notable thing that's vanished, as part of this profound change, is orgastic dancing. At the best gay discos in cities you would see men stripped, drenched in sweat, dancing like no tomorrow, and looking at their partner or no one, just wrapped up in the total hormonal thrill of it. Now they simply tastefully sway, and look around as if in hope someone is looking at them.

Yes, R27. A walk down Christopher Street, from Hudson Street to the river, was always a sexually charged adventure.

OP- You're ENDLESSLY fascinated by this. I'm only fascinated by this for a few minutes at most.

Yeah, r1 has it. If you think it was just NYC gays testing boundaries in the 70s, watch The Ice Storm.

A friend once said they could have sex five times just going to buy a newspaper. Everyone was 'switched on' to the possibilities when they stepped out the door. Now because all that febrile sexual signalling has vanished, it's like young gay guys have lost a complete 7th sense.

Mind you, a someone who lived in the ghetto said to me just before the arrival of AIDS: they now got something: a stomach bug, a gastro bug, hep, nonspecific utheritus, gon or syph. Ironically (and this will deeply disappoint the schoolmarms here) they were the only person in their share house of seven men not to die of AIDS.

Amoebas. Yes. Everyone had "amoebas."

In the last half year before AIDS hit, everyone was terrified about a new (hepatitis I think) that they were calling the Delta virus. Everyone was yacking about it. It's been completely forgotten. So my eyebrows were raised the other day when they renamed the new Indian version of Covid that's terrifiying everyone the Delta variant. History repeats.

That monomaniacal obsession is not healthy, r6. He's not even president anymore, you have to let him go.

R33- I think of that car from the 1970's- The Oldsmobile DELTA 88

R33 delta just means fourth. It’s the fourth letter in the alphabet.

Dur Mr Wizard.

Thankfully I don’t live in that time. In order for us to evolve as a society we need to be a post-sex society. Sex is inherently evil and people need to stop obsessing about it.

WHAAAAT?

As my lawyer says: Society won't be sane until there's fucking in the streets. Again.

We had to go through this period of sexual liberation. As basically sexual outlaws, we explored the extremes.

I thnk we'd have gotten tired of it even without AIDS, as the gay movement matured.

[quote] the Club Baths at 1st & 1st,

Omg! The nexus of the universe!

[quote] GGG is a Karen. He loves to perpetuate stereotypes of gay men.

You're clearly ignorant and didn't live through that time (or lived in relative isolation in your Laura Ashley dresses).

There's nothing wrong with recounting some gay history, which is what the OP is asking for, even if perhaps a bit misinformed.

STFU, little girl.

I would hate to live during that time. How did you all live with yourselves knowing your sexual practices we’re having a harmful carbon footprint? Using your gas guzzler going to bathhouses which wasted water etc.

R38 is a psycho Frau cunt and should get cancer and die

Oh, please, R38. It is obviously better to die from a sexually transmitted disease than from a disease you got and you didn't even get laid. It's always better to get laid.

R45 and it shows how you are no different than an animal. Just care about the next lay…

You're not a mammal, too, R46. Tell the truth. I think you are.

Yes r47 but I am human with reason. I don’t just fuck because I feel an urge. We are intelligent and should know better. Humanity is doomed with people just worrying about when they’re going to get laid Next…

If these gay club scenes are interesting to you , New Orleans had the biggest scenes of drag queens throughout the 60s and 70s. “Straight” frau men would go to these after work and let their actual sexual inhibitions release. Great YouTube videos.

My mother was the one who told me about the UpStairs Lounge fire several years back. Was a horrible tragedy with a considerable amount of fire deaths. It took the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans decades to realize this tragedy and to pray for the pst souls from the fire. And to me, that is just despicable.

You guys feeding the troll OP like he has genuine respect for gay people and interest in sex or gay culture are the worst.

The OP is only collecting tales of behavior he considers lethal or excessive in order to confirm his anti-gay bias and troll DLers about disease on more threads.

GermanGayGuy is one of Boris’s sock puppets and put-on personalities.

You should be F&Fing him and ignoring. You don’t want his “endless fascination.” Real Germans are a lot kinkier and worldlier than he’s pretending.

There’s a lot more hedonistic opportunity in the “abyss” of Germany.

Too bad you weren’t actually right there in the middle of it all, GermanFakeGuy/defacturd.

R27 - I love your insight. It really captures how it wasn’t just about sex - it was the release of the ego and sense of utter freedom and possibility. Living by id. The correlation of orgiastic dancing - alone, in groups, with a partner - is so so true. Dancing was such an intrinsically important part of being gay. Its so sad to see it disappear. I understand the need for sexual repression that was required as a result of a deadly sexually transmitted disease. I don’t understand why dancing disappeared. Grindr is not at all comparable to the 70s experience. Perhaps it will never happen again.

Go look at gay rights demonstrations in the 1960s. If you can find them. The lesbians in skirts and pumps. The gay men in jackets and ties. Sure, they were bold to go that far. But the repression they lived under is palpable.

There was enormous social upheaval in the 1960s. Wisely, gay men and lesbians got in on it. The freedoms enjoyed in the 1970s had rarely, if ever, been enjoyed before. It was a NEW way to live and while some posting here, who where not there, may find it repugnant or unhealthy, what we left behind in the 1960s was even worse.

If TikTok is the only place young people have to dance anymore, people, culture and society are FUCKED.

It’s not just ruinous to gays — straight people are now deprived, too.

Have raves and concerts become an elitist enclave where only the pretty people go?

They used to be where everyone came together and felt comfortable..

Thinking back to the 1970's. Yes, the sex was there to be had. The baths, the piers, the beach. But it could be very DANGEROUS. Men with broken arms., paint dumped in their faces. I knew of a guy who was thrown through a plate-glass window.

R54 because dancing is really that important?? Lol 🙄

Absolutely.

For poetic, engrossing “seedy stories” brimming with saudade, read David Wojnarowicz, especially “Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration” and “The Waterfront Journals.”

C'mon eldergays, get with the times. It's all still there, you just access it a little differently now.

I do buy that using Grindr might be a bit less exciting than developing a sense for cruising the streets, but: you can now be out running a simple errand and get a message on your smart phone from the guy in the apartment block opposite who's up for it. The male population has never been so open to same-sex experimentation as it is today (well, maybe in Ancient Rome, but this is the best it's been for a while).

R14: I don't know what chemsex was like in the 1970s, but Grindr is why the parties last longer nowadays: there is a constant new supply of fresh men available on the app.

No condoms. No trimming. Almost no rimming. That was then so I'm telling you now!

Back then we called it Gay Liberation.

Now it's called Gay Pride.

quite an evolution

I remember the massive death toll in the 80s.

In Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel memoir Fun Home, she talks about her dad taking her and her siblings to NYC and disappearing all the time by going out late at night to get the newspaper and most likely hooking up with guys for sex. There’s even a story here I hadn’t heard before about her brother wandering off to a cruising spot and being propositioned. They were up for the 1976 Bicentennial, which makes me think of that passage in And the Band Played On about how people all around the world were converging on NYC for the 4th of July and all the sex happening and likely hood that early strains of AIDS were making their way through the gay community. She even surmises that had he not committed suicide her dad may of likely have caught AIDS and died due to his down low illicit sexual behavior.

[quote] her dad may of likely have

Oh, DEAR!

Oh faboo! We're all must sitting here aching to lose ourselves a dumbfuck frau novel appropriating gay experience.

The RESONANCE!

Thanks Karen R65! Blessings to you.

^^Uh, what?

R67 You obviously have no idea what Fun Home is about, as I said it’s a memoir done in a graphic novel format that explores the complex relationship and parallels between a gay father and lesbian daughter. The musical won the Tony for best musical and four others and was short listed for the Pulitzer. It’s probably one of the more in-depth explorations of the closeted gay father and family man experience looking at it with an unflinching, brutal honesty. Jake Gylenhaal purchased the right to the musical and will be starring as the father in the movie.

[quote]Thinking back to the 1970's. Yes, the sex was there to be had. The baths, the piers, the beach. But it could be very DANGEROUS. Men with broken arms., paint dumped in their faces. I knew of a guy who was thrown through a plate-glass window.

Which is one of many reasons why it's good public policy to enforce the right of consenting adults to marry, date, and yes, even anonymously hook up as a normal part of their lives. It helps cut the criminals and predators out of the equation.

[quote]Jake Gylenhaal purchased the right to the musical and will be starring as the father in the movie.

He lives at the end, right?

R71 No, he gets run over by a tractor trailer, most likely having committed suicide.

I'm enjoying Netflix's Halston which has a number of scenes showing the debauchery of the 70s

[quote] depraved and shocking

In response to R50, use of these terms seems like it might convey a negative bias on the part of the OP that I didn't notice at first.

I don't really pay particularly close attention to GGG's posts of or to the accusatory posts of others regarding trolling, etc.

Bump

Bump

I miss full bath houses full of men ready to get it on

R60 I like your optimism but it’s just not the same. When something is so readily available, the thrill of the chase evaporates.

I've mentioned this before in another thread, but back in the 80s there was a veritable sexoteria located on 11th Ave. called "The Glory Hole". A membership club of 4 floors of all kinds of GHs, 1 hole, 2 hole, 4 hole, and even bigger group holes, as well as booths separated by full length plexiglass dividers with big GHs cut into them (much better than the solid wood dividers). Absolute unbridled sex all night long. I had (or rather gave) the pleasure of a fully uniformed NYC cop on one of my visits. And believe me, he had more that one weapon at the ready that night.

Up until AIDS got really bad in NYC you could find action almost anywhere you looked. If you saw a hunky guy leaning up against a building somewhere on the sidewalk eyeing other guys as they passed you could almost be assured he was out on the prowl and ready for action.

Whew, this thread is a redtag jamboree!

Like adapting to the “new normal” of Covid, it took a while to accept the hard reality that it was over and would never happen again. The free sex and abundant options, the uninhibited decadence and condomless sex. The 80s sucked. Some tried to hang onto it but it just couldn’t be. I think about it often as accept the new lifestyle required by Covid. It’s a slow moving dawning of a new reality - slow motion mourning for the end of a way of life.

It's interesting - I was searching for something else on DL earlier and read a really interesting thread about gay sex in the 1970s. And here's this newer thread on a similar thing. I'm also interested in this topic, as part of my general interest in the history of the 1970s and what it must've been like to live then.

I'm going to have to seek out this documentary, Gay Sex in the 70s, is it?

By the way, is Cruising (1980) worthwhile? I can remember in the 00s hearing people talking about how offensive a portrayal of gay men it was. Nowadays I hear a lot of gay men talking with fond remembrance of it.

[quote] Back in the day gay men used to get fisted by the busloads, now they are all in the suburbs…

…going to hospitals frequently because their intestines can't avoid fecal incontinence and Crohn's disease.

I’ve been to orgies, jack off parties and open room sex clubs all through the late 90’s where group sex was encouraged. Here’s my take-

Unless you’re having drug-fueled sex and high, it’s not that fun. First, not everyone has the same hygienic standards. Even though I don’t mind a bit of musk, there were guys were rank. Secondly, most places were FAR from being in top condition, or quality. Most were run down, poorly lit and dilapidated. Many of the guys were old and pot bellied. Any cuties were few and far between and you could SMELL the desperation pouring from elder gays when one finally came around they’d be jacking off furiously.

I was good looking and loved the seedy nature of the places and was game for anything and met lots of interesting people, even a few that became boyfriend or two. However, it’s a specific type of guy (including myself) that frequents these places so I didn’t expect loyalty or devotion from them. There are some nice places in both Montreal and Toronto, and I regret not checking out a bathouse in Paris because I was with my husband but definitely would’ve gone if I was single.

My favorite place was a video booth on 8th Av. near Times Sq. that had pseudo-straight guys constantly looking for guys to pay them for sex. Some of them were the hottest men I’ve seen in NYC the 20 years I lived there! I had several hot scenes and met a celeb’s then boyfriend, who was ripped and absolutely delicious looking.

That said, the advent of smartphone cameras and people openly filming pretty much killed any desire to have group sex for me. That and incurable super STDs. Oh, and I’m happily married too.

City Boy by Edmund White gives a pretty graphic account of whoring opportunities in NYC in the 70s. I don’t know how he got any work done.

Many people here have never lived in NYC or another densely populated city. The most sexually active people by age are people in their 20s, and in NYC in the 1970s and 1980s, it was the rare person in his 20s who had an apartment to himself, or, if he did, it was the size of a walk-in closet. What that meant in essence is that people rarely invited people home for sex as they do in smaller cities and in suburbs. Instead, it was simply easier to go to a bathhouse, bookstore, sex club, or to a public park to have sex. These places were available, there was practically an unlimited supply of willing partners, there were no sheets or towels to wash after the fact, and no need to rush home from work and houseclean for an hour, with no arrangements or explanations needed for roommates. . So what seems like seamy and debauched behavior was simply making do with the circumstances of life in a crowded city. I have read that parks in big cities in China are a mad crush of people (including a huge number of straight people) having sex after dark for very much the same reasons. Having come out sexually in NYC in the late 1970s it was weird for me to move to a much smaller city in north Florida in 1984 and to learn all the protocols for inviting someone home for sex. One plus for outdoor or public environment sex was that if anything was not contributing to the mood (someone's bad breath, poor hygiene, bad skin, whatever), it was a cinch to break it off -"uh oh, I hear someone coming"- and a person could zip up and disengage without appearing rude. That is much trickier to do when you have invited someone into your home for sex.

Things like fist fucking, piss play, bondage, and other similar activities were always just for people who had fetishes and they were a tiny minority of the gay community as a whole. People will notice things like all the strange leather and sex activity at something like Door in San Francisco without ever registering that it's 100 people looking on for every one person participating.

Cultural adaptation

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In the 80s, - at least on the UWS where I lived - whenever you left your apartment there was a good 75% chance that you wouldn't make it back without getting some anonymous dick.

Could you do drugs in public without worrying about someone busting your ass?

[quote]Back in the day gay men used to get fisted by the busloads, now they are all in the suburbs raising kids. What a strange evolution.

Many people want families as they grow older. Why do you think that's strange?

R91 It's s painfully heteronormative lifestyle that's bland as fuck. I prefer interesting people.

I was a teenager in the midwest in the 70s, and I missed out on the action. After being graduated from college in 1982, I was ready to catch up on all I missed. I wanted to have fun. But, AIDS was slowly becoming a major issue in the gay community. When one of my new friends at a club died of AIDS, I put a stop to my sexual behavior. I was terrified.

Only when I worked for a gay newspaper did I have a full impression of our community. I was very careful sexually. I realized I didn't have to have sex to be a happy gay man. But I do enjoy the hot stories from the past.

R92 yup. Much like feminism, the gay rights movement tricked gay men into giving up true freedom for a pale imitation of another lifestyle that is more profitable to the people pulling the levers of society.

It's interesting - what would a gay community look like after obtaining equal protection under the law but without reference to traditional heterosexual ideals? I have no idea what the answer would be. Might be an interesting topic for an alternate history novel.

Gay Liberation was and still is sadly, only for the beautiful and the very outgoing.

All the 60s druggies died-off, too. Excess kills.

[quote]All the 60s druggies died-off

... and those that survived turned MAGA.

Great post, r86!

OP, you might enjoy this book (if you can find it).

Tricks: Twenty Five Encounter By Renaud Camus Pub: Serpent's Tail - 1996 - Paperback

It’s where I first encountered the term “Lucky Pierre.” Still hoping for that someday…

Follow up to R100: here’s a link to read it online.

Some of my favorite memories are from the Gaiety theatre. One time there were twins on stage together and it was so hot! I was late teens early 20's in the 70's and 80's.

Bump

It's too bad most of those stories ended up as ghost stories.

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OP, there is a podcast out there about the HIV/AIDS crisis called Fiasco, and I listened to the first couple of episodes (the rest is only available on Audible). Some of the stories in the early episodes were CRAZY. Like guys, who were still fairly young, tallying up that they had been penetrated by 2-3,000 men. I know this is actually a very sad story, but it was really interesting to hear how different sex lives were in the 70s before the horribleness of the 80s started happening.