Gay Sex In The 70s

On my last trip to Blockbuster Video in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, what should I find in the stacks but Joe Lovett's documentary, Gay Sex In The 70s. I loved turning it over to the teenager behind the counter so she could ring me up. She gave me a sort of inquisitive look, to which I responded with a big smile that announced, "Yes I am."

Back from the MAsT meeting today, I made dinner for my dad and settled in to watch.

When I saw my friend George Catravas in a still early on, I knew I was going to enjoy it.

George was the embodiment of Gay Sex In The 70s for me. Once when I introduced George to a young woman who was a friend of mine, Alexis D___, George said, "Alexis D___... Did you have a father named Alex D___ by any chance?"

Alexis replied that she did.

"What a coincidence!" George responded gleefully, "Your father once balled me royally in the Rambles!"

Alexis took that pretty well, but I was struck by the fact that it didn't occur to George that telling someone you had sex with their father is not like telling someone you kenw him. But from what I know of George, it was much the same thing.

When I was sixteen years old, I was working as a dishwasher at Mother's Restaurant in New Hope, Pennsylvania. I had a cigaret going in an ashtray. One of the waiters, Herbie, ran back to the dishwashing area.

"Drew," he said, "could I get a drag of your cigaret?"

"Sure thing, Herbie," I answered.

He picked it up, raised it to his lips, and then stopped.

"Um, Drew? How's your health? Do you have anything I might catch?"

"Like a cold, Herbie?"

"No, not like a cold."

"Like what? Like Herpes? Herbie! You can't get herpes from a cigaret, can you?"

Herbie explained, briefly, that up in New York, gay men were getting sick. And dying.

This was 1980. There wasn't even a name for it then. Not even GRID, little less AIDS. I was already having sex with men.

Of course, things got weirder. "Don't have sex with anybody from New York, LA, or San Francisco," someone told me at one point. Once I heard, "Don't have sex with young guys."

So my teen years involved things like people going off to New York because they had some mysterious "liver disease," gay men discovering that they were bisexual, John Berra--this hot bear before there were bears--showing us this weird purple bruise he had in his mouth and being dead a week later.

Now, this didn't stop me from having sex. It didn't even slow me down much. It wasn't until after I was out of college, maybe 1987, when I was taking it up the butt in a dirty bookstore (then a recent discovery; anal sex, I mean, not dirty bookstores). He pulled out and said, "Y'know, you shouldn't let people you don't know do that. So much." (People like him.)

Long story short, there was a period of perhaps four months when I was sixteen years old that I was having sex with reckless, joyful abandon. And then, not so much.

Instead, there was sex with rubbers, and activism with reckless, joyful abandon. Heck, I remember when giving a blowjob to someone not wearing a condom was viewed as tantamount to taking a nap with a dry-cleaning bag over your head. When I first moved to New York, many of the bars had backrooms, and interestingly, they also had people employed as "safer sex monitors." I know, I dated one.

To be sure, I and most of the men I have sex with have relaxed a great deal. And I've heard talk that the advent of sero-sorting--an HIV prevention strategy endorsed by the San Francisco Department of Health--there might be something of a renaissance.

And I've sure had some good times. And more to come. I have no cause for complaint.

But still, by circumstances of the year of my birth, I missed out.

The movie, by the way, is worth the watch. And you can get it at your local Blockbuster!