The Truth Heals

[January 4th, 2006] ]The new flick Gay Sex in the 70s isn't just a titillating tell-all about a group of guys who loved and lived to fuck other men.

In fact, it's sort of a mistake that director Joseph Lovett gave his documentary, currently playing at Cinema 21, such an audience-limiting, porn-sounding title. Indeed, it is a slightly raw exposé of the sexual comings and goings of gay men that begins at the end of one kind of queer suppression (Stonewall, June 1969) and ends at the beginning of a different sort of queer suppression (AIDS, June 1981). But that these dates bookend an era doesn't come up until the film's last minutes. This is not a story that tries to blame the AIDS crisis on queers and their sexual behavior.

It's quite the opposite.

The cultural equivalent of an archeological dig, it combs through the debris of a group of open-minded individuals who, after centuries of oppression, came out of the shadows and—for a very short time in the 1970s—openly flourished. That these men would pay such a high price for their freedom is just a sad denouement to their story.

What was truly revolutionary about gay men in the '70s is that they found a new way to connect to one another. Rather than make secret assignations with other men through the traditional, yet equally homophobic and homoerotic, trappings of recreational sports, they did it openly through recreational sex. And boy, did they ever connect. Sex happened everywhere: the bars, the baths, behind bushes, on the street. Gay pornography had a hard time keeping up with real life.

As one of the more telling interviewees, artist Barton Benes, shares, "Sex was first...I couldn't imagine living without it," even though he "ended up" in the hospital due to an unfortunate fisting incident.

Even writer Larry Kramer, today's most rabid protester of sexual promiscuity among queer men, admits in the film the easiest place to have sex was at the baths: "It was simple...like a candy store."

But if we've learned anything from history, it's that liberty has a way of crashing down around you. And for those of you who have conveniently forgotten, the '70s sexual revolution wasn't happening just to these lucky fuckers—it was happening to everyone. Even though many of these men had more sex in 24 hours than most people have in a year, in Gay Sex Lovett refuses to admonish gay men for the advent of AIDS. Rather, he gives urban queers props for motivating an entire country to handle an ungodly situation. He recognizes how they turned the love they felt into political activism when, as one says, "the war came." This isn't revisionist history—it's the truth.

And herein lies the beauty of this film.

By telling the stories of the gay men who thrived in these tryst-fueled years, Lovett has made flesh a time for which we have nothing to be ashamed of. That he handles it with equal amounts of pathos and humor only drives home how human all men—including queer men—are.