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By Jeff Slutzky
Monday, August 21, 2006
I RECENTLY WATCHED the documentary "Gay Sex in the ’70s," which came out last year but is now on DVD. It’s a bittersweet look back at the care-free sex life of gay men in Manhattan in the era that began with Stonewall riots of 1969, an event recogonized as the birth of the gay-rights movement, and lasted until in the summer of 1981, when AIDS was first reported. As I encountered the stories of people having unprotected sex on piers and in the back of delivery trucks, I found myself scornful of them. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been.
This summer, of course, the world has observed the 25th anniversary of the discovery of AIDS, which effectively ended the Gay Seventies. It wasn’t clear at first that AIDS was spread by a virus, or even that it was spread through sex. As Randy Shilts noted in his book about the early years of the AIDS crisis, "And the Band Played On," some scientists thought it might be caused by poppers.
Even though other sexually-transmitted diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea were already rampant in the gay community in the 1970s, some people resisted the notion that AIDS could be spread by sex. After all, who’d want to believe that sex could kill you? Denial is a powerful emotion.
FOR SOMEONE LIKE ME, born in 1973, watching "Gay Sex in the 70s" is like watching a foreign film. First there are the fashions: the unkempt hair, the mustaches, the clothes. Stranger still is the movie’s description of the Hudson Street Piers, which were covered with decrepit wooden buildings filled with men having sex at all hours. Even scarier are the stories of how men would wander at night down to the warehouses at the piers and climb into the pitch-black unknown awaiting in the storage areas of delivery trucks, where the men were packed in like sardines with masses of unidentifiable people.
The mental image of men voluntarily cramming themselves into the back of vehicles normally used for freight eerily evokes the image of Jews being crammed into dark cattle cars in 1940s Eastern Europe. In one case participation was voluntary, the other not, but in neither case did people know they were headed for a Holocaust.
Those poor gay men, I thought. They had no idea what they were doing to themselves.
NOTHING REMAINS OF the warehouses at the Hudson Street piers other than wooden stumps sticking out of the water, but have times really changed? The gay party culture thrives today, especially with the help of the Internet and crystal meth. The men are more clean-cut and better-groomed than they were 30 years ago, but many of them engage in behavior just as risky as their 1970s counterparts, even though we know today what they didn’t know back then — that unprotected sex can kill.
Sex in itself is not inherently dangerous, of course, and there’s a difference between anonymous sex and unprotected sex. As far as physical health is concerned, whom you have sex with is less important than the precautions you take with that person. Unprotected sex with someone you think you know can be just as dangerous as unprotected sex with someone you don’t know at all.
Such unprotected sex is more common today than it was in the thick of the AIDS crisis, particularly among those who are too young to have lived to see half their friends die. It’s hard for people of my generation to conceive of losing so many members of their social circles to an early death, especially when medication can keep many people ostensibly healthy.
Sometimes I ask myself how those men in the 1970s could have been so stupid. Then I remember: They didn’t know any better. Americans in the 1970s lived in a world in which modern Western medicine seemed to be conquering disease. Polio and smallpox were being eradicated. As Gabriel Rotello writes in the introduction to his book "Sexual Ecology": "a mistaken belief in the powers of medicine contributed to a lifestyle of intrinsic risk."
I wonder sometimes if the next gay killer is already out there, spreading itself invisibly through activities that are considered low-risk for HIV, such as oral sex. Are we killing ourselves all over again without even realizing it? If so, perhaps we’re no smarter than our 1970s forebearers. They weren’t stupid, of course; they were merely uninformed, and just as subject to the whims of our sexual desires as we are today.
Perhaps someday someone will make a documentary called "Gay Sex in the ’00s." If so, I hope it has a happy ending.
Jeff Slutzky lives in New York City and can be reached at jeffslutzky@yahoo.com.
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