'Gay Sex in the 70's (English, Special Interest, 2005)
Director: Joseph Lovett
Cast: Robert Alvarez, Alvin Baltrop, Barton Benes and others
Joseph Lovett's 'Gay Sex in the '70s', released in the UK almost five years after it first came out in the States, has a misleading title. It's really a documentary about New York, mostly downtown New York at that, and only about those men - women are almost wholly absent here - who embraced the freedoms that opened up to them post1968. It is, unusually and unashamedly, a celebration of the hedonism vigorously savoured by a generation of men who had been brought up in more cloistered and repressive times.
Veterans of the period recount how they flocked to the abandoned warehouses and piers of a blighted, recessionary city to quench their loneliness. They manufactured with furious abandon, and often helped by drugs, a culture that one interviewee characterises as more pornographic than any pornographic film.
The bathhouses they frequented were imperial in their excesses. The men's fondness for clubs and bars, and indeed the extent to which some of them dedicated themselves to pleasure, created all sorts of economic opportunities; soon Manhattan, and other cities all across the world, would retool themselves as 24/7, perpetualparty playgrounds.
'Gay Sex in the '70s' is technically erratic and far from definitive. Full of fascinating stories and fleshed out with evocative archival footage, it's also a loving portrait of a semiforgotten New York.