Over their shoulder: "Gay Sex in the 70s"

Joseph Lovett's brisk, to-the-point documentary Gay Sex in the 70s charts the period in gay culture between Stonewall in 1969 and the discovery of AIDS in 1981 - as one interviewee describes it, the most decadent decade since the fall of the Roman Empire, Sodom before the gonorrhea. The thesis these interviews set out is that the gay men who fought their corner at Stonewall - homosexuality's own Vietnam - were mere boys, with no context for growing up gay. By contrast, the 70s were an explosion of pent-up sexual energy, aided by throbbing disco beats and the easy availability of recreational drugs, and perhaps most apparent in the sudden proliferation of gay and camp imagery in art, on stage (in the likes of O Calcutta! and Hair, with their frequent, dangling penises) and in pornography.

What we get, then, is an especially horny coming-of-age story, its locus the abandoned piers way down low on the southernmost tip of Manhattan, where the element of risk was only enhanced by the darkness and the dodgy floorboards; habitues of the scene recall guys falling into (and, in especially extreme cases, drowning in) the Hudson River below, or emerging into the morning to find their wallets had gone AWOL. The sense one gets is of a decade of experimentation and naivety: one participant reveals how perplexed he was when he took home a leather boy who wanted to flush his head down the toilet, and I feel we should probably warn grandma there's a painful fisting anecdote at one point.

A somewhat childish approach towards matters of sexual health becomes apparent, too. We hear of doctors holding orgies, and of cruising going on in the waiting rooms of New York's STD clinics. AIDS was surely lying in wait around the next corner (or under the boardwalk), but for the most part, the consensus was the period was non-stop hedonistic fun: nude sunbathing, glitterballs and cock by the yard. One caveat with Lovett's film is that it's almost entirely Manhattan-centric: very much Gay Sex in the City in the 70s, there's little on what it might have meant to grow up gay in the sticks, where there weren't any gyms or baths or Fire Island to hang around; the idea everyone was out and proud and getting some (if not loads) surely throws a rainbow-coloured blanket over some of the trickier stories that might have been told. (Nothing, either, of lesbian or transgendered sex in the 1970s, either, if we're going to enter into that debate.)

The interviews are your standard low-budget, face-on, single camera fare, with no adornment save the occasional example of outre facial hair, but the formal slack is taken up by Lovett's evocative use of archive footage and photography: candid period snapshots displaying consenting adults getting up to all sorts of naughtiness on rooftops, in windows and steamrooms, and - of course - on the dancefloor. Any voyeuristic tendencies are offset by the personal nature of the testimony Lovett has collated: explicit at some points, yes, but reflective at others (particularly towards the end, as the first lesions begin to appear), it manages to overturn a good few of the stereotypes and assumptions we may have come to associate with the era. That said, one of the interviewees actually turns out to have been in the navy. If I knew how to scream, my friends, I would have done.

Gay Sex in the 70s is on selected release.