The Gay 1970s: A Survivor’s Story

In Joseph F. Lovett’s documentary movie, “Gay Sex in the 70s” (out on DVD June 6), survivors of the 1970's reminisce about gay life in New York City during the hectic decade between the Stonewall Riots and the AIDS epidemic. Listening to the likes of Arnie Kantrowitz, Lawrence Mass, Tom Bianchi and even Larry Kramer wax nostalgic about the good old days, I thought about the French statesman Talleryand who, having survived both the French Revolution and Napoleon, said that “he [or she] who has not lived in the years around 1780 has not known the pleasure of life.” Talleyrand, of course, was one of the lucky ones.

Like the veterans in “Gay Sex in the 70s” (and Talleyrand) I am fortunate to be around to tell my story. And while I was not featured in Lovett’s documentary - a completely New York-centered movie that ignored everything that was going on everywhere else - I told my story in “Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones,” James T. Sears’s 2001 history of the lesbian and gay South in the 1970's. My presence in Professor Sears’s book, unlike Talleyrand’s in French history, is serendipitous: I was in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. Even so, this experience allowed me to join the likes of Jack Fritscher, Brad Gooch, Ethan Mordden, Felice Picano, Edmund White and the heroes of “Gay Sex in the 70's.”

Today we tend to idealize the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS decade as a golden age of gay sex. Like most middle age men, those of us who lived through the disco era tend to exaggerate our youthful sexual experiences. And like Talleyrand’s aristocrats, only a minority of affluent, white gay men (and some favored Blacks and Latinos), living in large cities in the USA, Canada and Western Europe, were able to enjoy “the pleasure of [gay] life” in the 70's. There certainly wasn’t much joy in being gay in the South, outside of cities like Miami and Atlanta, New Orleans and Houston. Most of those who were openly gay in the seventies’ South were mostly young and poor and naive and very untypical. Most Southern “A-list” gays, who would have been the creme of gay society in New York, were in the closet. To be publicly gay was to court disaster, as was the case with the 28 men who perished in a fire that consumed the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans (1973). That someone like the late Logan Carter (a.k.a. “Roxanne Russell”) flourished in such a climate speaks volumes for Carter’s force of character - and his incredible talent.

If there was anything that characterized the men and women of the “Rubyfruit generation”, it was our innocence and our idealism. We really believed that we could make things better, for ourselves and for our brothers and sisters. Though we lost some of our innocence on June 7, 1977, the day the voters of Miami-Dade County Florida repealed their county’s “gay rights” ordinance, we managed to keep our idealism intact through repeated electoral defeats, the assassination of Harvey Milk, and the “White Night” riots. The first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights (1979) was, at least for the men, a celebration of gay sexual freedom as much as a political statement.

Many people who did not live through the 1970's view that decade as a period of unbridled decadence; and the people who were sexually active then as unprincipled libertines who sowed the seeds of their own destruction. This is unfair of course; people who cruised urban bars, baths, back rooms, parks and docks from 1970 to 1979 could not know that AIDS was around the corner. I certainly don’t regret living through the gay seventies, though I would do anything to bring back the many friends that I’ve lost since then. It was wonderful to go through my prime at a time when the drinking age was 18, and when the worst you could get from sex (we thought) could be cured by a trip to the VD Clinic. I was lucky to have had a partner at such uncertain times, and though we have gone on to other relationships, I am glad to say that we are still friends. Though most lesbians and gay men did not get along with each other at the time, I was blessed with wonderful women friends. And finally, though I’ve since lost my 1970's innocence, I managed to retain my idealism throughout three decades of grief and disappointment.

Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and unabashed lefty (in both senses of the word) who lives and writes in South Florida. Send him a note at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.