Gay Sex in the 70s

 

The blunt title of this documentary accurately captures the spirit of its subject: the period after Stonewall and before AIDS when gay men in New York set about making up for years of repression by divesting sex of sentiment and consequence, and by having it off with an eye watering frequency. Told through occasionally graphic archive images and interviews with survivors (for that is what the ensuing epidemic would make them), there is a rueful nostalgia for “the most libertine period since ancient Rome”. If there was undoubtedly a heady sense of liberation and blissful hedonism in the air, there was also a squalor and desperation to the anonymous encounters in the back of trucks, on derelict piers and in the darkened back rooms of bars, which makes this a quintessential story of 1970s New York and which – with hindsight – makes it hard not to have forebodings of the coming storm. [Keir Roper-Caldbeck]