Is Sex Dead? Part Two: The Seventies Party

I was in grade school and then high school for the last four years of the decade, pretty much insulated in the segregated Western suburbs of Chicago from the “big bad city” where undesirables (anyone not white, straight, or Catholic) preyed on young white Catholic school kids. 

Little did I know (and this is mostly anecdotal evidence) that guys in the burgeoning “gay ghettos” at that time were enjoying lots of sex, and not just inside, but outside. Now, they had been having public sex from some time, and the risks of arrest were still there, but … One person I know told me about several encounters between men that inevitably resulted in sex. A glance … a look at the crotch … constant cruising. My friend made it seem that these “quick tricks” were par for the course. I've heard stories about sex in and on trucks, sex in hardware stores, sex at the YMCA (all you needed to do was leave your door open) … was life really like a porn movie at that time? 
 

Not that sexual liberation was confined to the gay community or other countercultural movements. The Baby Boomers who were gradually settling down in the suburban subdivisions (mostly white upper middle class couples with money and leisure time) were experimenting with “swinging.” I read recently on the Huffington Post about swinging parties: 

Long before car keys were collected at parties from those who drank too much, suburban swingers in the 1970s collected them for a different reason. As they entered the party, the men would deposit their car keys in a bowl by the front door. On the way out, the women would fish a set of keys from the bowl and that's who they'd go home with. 

(Not exactly, it seems, an even power exchange; why are the women “fishing out” the men's keys, and not vice versa?) 

Everyone, it seems, was looking for Mr. Goodbar, but Mr. Goodbar wasn't necessarily someone you would marry and procreate with. 
 

And now that the gay community was evolving socially into something close to what people like me who came out later became, social structures resembling a heterosexual norm (such as marriage) were not just questioned, but even rejected. In fact, the leaders of the Gay Liberation Front in New York said in July 1969, "We expose the institution of marriage as one of the most insidious and basic sustainers of the system. The family is the microcosm of oppression.” 
 

Gay pride parades resembled militant marches. Life in the urban gay communities was focused on bathhouses, at that time veritable “sex palaces,” bars, adult movie theaters, discos, campy cabarets, and a handful of accepting churches and community organizations. Gay macho (think the Brawny paper towel guy) was in. The total look was big, in your face and in your crotch: big boots, big hair, big moustaches. Out, loud, and proud! 
 

But outside these islands of what seemed to be nonstop partying, just blocks away from the long lines to get into the Bijou Theater in Chicago, one could still be fired for being gay. Gay sex between consenting adults was still a criminal offense in many states. The American Psychiatric Association's proclamation that homosexuality was not an illness was still comparatively new and not generally accepted by large segments of the population. The holy haters like Anita Bryant and others in what would become the Religious Right Movement were slowly gaining political and social power. 
 

 

Being out, loud, and proud outside of the urban gay enclaves could mean social rejection and even death. 

And in the next decade, gay sex itself became a death sentence as the AIDS epidemic swept over these communities still fighting for survival.