By Perry Brass

It seems wonderful for me now to remember the seventies as a distinct period. While I was living through it, it seemed more like a transition from the sixties—the great, wild, mind-blowing sixties—than a separate period that I would look back on wistfully. I remember waking up with my boyfriend "of the time" (and there always seemed to be a boyfriend "of the time" at that time ) on a cold January morning and it was 1970. But it still seemed like 1960-something. The real seventies, most people would say, would not begin until about four years later with the end of the war in Vietnam. But in my own gay world they had hit a bit earlier: they began when the sixties "consciousness," which had been full of love in its bell-bottomed, flowery, English-public-school-accented innocence, opened up, wide, for sex. The seventies meant sex. They meant sex as fun. Pure recreational sex. Not cosmic, mind-blowing "I-am-you-and-you-are-me-and-we-are-all-together" Beatles lovefest sex, but Village People "YMCA" sex: the kind of sex you might have in the showers with a strange dude that was so hot the pipes melted, but which did not (necessarily) lead to any "relationship" afterwards. The song "YMCA" was a covert gay anthem. It said, basically, it's all available: just show a little balls and go for it. It was followed by another Village People let's-all-get-fucked-and-charging ditty called "In The Navy" which the Navy was actually dumb enough to adopt for a couple of weeks, even as every queen and his mother knew exactly what they were singing about doing down there in a submarine. It is true that the seventies were not as publicly open about gay sex as the late eighties and nineties would later become. After all the big movies of the period were "Deep Throat" and "The Devil and Miss Jones"—movies about female blow jobs—but an attitude had come in that was completely unknown to gays up to that period. The attitude was simply: being gay was a wonderful club and now anybody could join it. Birds could do it; bees could do it. And hard-assed truck drivers, horny cowboys, and "dumb" sailors could do it—not simply as trade, not simply getting sucked off in some back row on 42nd Street, but could actually do it. And in doing it, they were not alone. They were now part of a force, a movement . . . and, most absolutely American of all, a market. This all came about quickly through that marriage of commerce and consciousness we'd eventually see as the "gay movement," which quickly joined what had become the larger movement for sexual freedom. For many of us, it was a difficult movement to stay in, because the boat kept stopping at every port and picking up passengers we weren't sure we wanted to sail with on such choppy waters. It started out with a few of us meeting in church basements and cold water hippie apartments; then it got taken up by "gay capitalists" who said if some of us could be free to screw, maybe others of us could be free to charge admission: to open bars, bathhouses, sex tabloids and slick four-color magazines—and keep people happy while at the same time raking in a tidy sum. Although many of us had brought in our sixties feminist consciousness that we thought would serve as life preservers (as long as we held on to our scruples, no one was going to get ahead of us), which urged, in short, for "equal non-exploitative" relationships, quickly enough people were wading out to the boat with whips, chains, and S & M hankies; men who were into very small kiddies wanted a place; dykes who wanted the same hot sex the guys were trying out kept climbing aboard; and some gentlemen who felt that being tied down and pissed on was absolute heaven. Since sex is one of man's greatest appetites and in America he'd been starving for years, the sexual seventies seemed to come out with a bang, as quickly as the first gay tabloids appeared on newstands in Times Square, while the political seventies had to wait until about mid-decade to catch up. During this period, which coincided for the most part with my twenties, I was well set up, living in a rock-bottom but comfortable rent-controlled railroad-flat apartment in New York's Hell's Kitchen. I had waded through GLF and radical gay politics in the early 70s, barely surviving the leftist "survival of the most P.C. politics" of the period. I had managed to get myself through NYU on what remained of one of Lyndon Johnson's successful "Great Society" programs (I was told by my school counselor, "Congratulations, you're the first white person to ever get your way through this!"), while I cleaned apartments for spending money. By mid-decade I was working as a (what could be more 70s?) rock n' roll journalist. Through my connections in the publicity world, the gay world, and various outposts of the magazine world, I was now interviewing stars, getting to ride in corporate limos, and wined and dined on the money flowing in like Niagara from the full-tilt youth market for rock records. This was truly crazy for me because I wasn't crazy about rock—at home I listened to classical music and jazz and saw everything else as work—but it put me in the middle of the zeitgeist of the era, when a flagrantly commercial pop culture was boring its way through what passed as "American culture," chewing up everything in its way. Pop then was as queer as a three dollar bill, but nobody talked about it as long as it produced enough green stuff of higher denominations. The attitude was, "If you make enough money, who cares what you do with your genitals?" There was a constant gentleman's agreement (and it was all a boys club; women were excluded from pop management almost 100 percent) that the gay world could achieve a kind of strong silent legitimacy through the pop one. How else could a group of such obvious "screamers" as the Village People become international hits, making more "heterosexual" sensations like the BeeGees and Abba (which, Jesus, is back again like old vomit), look, in the weird reversals of pop, like limp pansies? My strange lifestyle, based on what I would call "affluent poverty" (as in having record companies pick me up in a chauffeured limo in front of the garbage cans and winos at my walk-up tenement), allowed me to partake in that most 70s indigenous art form known as hanging out. In 1997, this pastime is almost extinct, like playing Mah Jong. Then it seemed like half of the world was doing it. Hanging out segued easily into cruising, or at least soft-core cruising, as in: "Gee, you're kinda nice and we've known each other for about . . . six minutes, so let's go home, smoke a J and slide into the sack together." People now put cruising down, rather like the way Christian fundamentalists disdain astrology. This is mostly because we associate it with the hard "Yo man, so you think you're good enough to handle my dick?" attitude of the present. But cruising in the seventies was softer, more voluptuous, and less obsessive. In short, it was more productive. We had less muscles, maybe, but fewer cases of blue balls. You got more sex for your cruising time. As I put it in my book of seventies erotica, "Works and Other 'Smoky George' Stories," men cruised more then and networked less. We were not looking for business partners, but sex partners. And you did not have to get out there with your business cards and propose asset mergers to meet them. The assets you wanted to merge were your front and back ones. Central Park (I remember spending whole summers in the Rambles, where you'd meet your friends in the meadow surrounded by the lush sounds of guys crawling all over each other in the bushes), Riis Park Beach in Queens which quickly became nude, and Jones Beach out on Long Island, were all great hanging out spots. As were the magnificent sex piers on the Hudson in the West Village (which have since been torn down by civic minded real estate developers) and whole blocks of the Upper West Side along Columbus Avenue, when it still had real neighborhood stores instead of variations of ChiChi's and the Gap. The thing to do was meet your friends on the streets—in groups of four or six—and then go places from there. It was a very European, unplanned, and elegant way of spending time. Now I meet young men who tell me they're booked up seven months in advance and I wonder if that will keep them from dying. But then we did not make plans more than a few weeks ahead, and usually that meant we might be hitchhiking through Europe or just looking for another place to hang out while New York went through a change of seasons. There was still a certain amount of the "old culture" alive in America in the mid-seventies. The old culture was also gay culture. It was classical music, great art (instead of bad art with high prices, which the eighties brought us), wonderful, wry, sparkling conversation, and class, that sense that there were people who had a kind of magic about them that you could not buy with dollars. (This attitude is so extinct now it makes the reptiles in "Jurassic Park" look contemporary.) Like many of my friends from this period, I still kept one foot in the old culture even while the other one was interviewing Billy Joel and Blue Oyster Cult. I felt most of the time like a spy in the pop world. To me the old culture was the real world. The rest was just a scam, a shill game, to make money. What made New York tingle and sparkle was the presence of people like George Balanchine, the "god" of ballet, who was held in cult devotion by many of my friends. I was in such awe of Balanchine that when I met him on the street I could not talk: I could talk to Rod Stewart or Bette Midler, but not to George Balanchine. Balanchine was a heavenly genius, in the sphere of Auden, Stravinsky, and Martha Graham—and we knew by the seventies that this world was coming to an end. But something else was taking its place and I was a part of that, too. You did not have to go to ballet to witness unbelievable settings, dance and music: now you could become a part of it—at the discos. The discos of the 70s, and they were a gay institution—vast halls of near-naked bodies, drugs, sound and light effects, and more bodies—were the theater of this period. They had taken over from fringe, audience participation groups like The Living Theater and the famous Performance Group in Soho, where an entire evening might be spent watching six people crawl around on their hands and knees shouting Euripides. Places like Le Jardin, Flamingo, and the Saint made the crowd the performer, working in tandem with orchestrated manufactured sounds. In the seventies, you went to discos to perform. Donna Summers was a disco diva, but she was totally manufactured by the German producer Georgio Moroder. She was an international product, even further along the line of pop productness than Diana Ross, but not quite as far along as Madonna would become a decade later. Hearing that vast wail of Summers that came funneling towards you like a wipe-out wave while what was left of your brain was merely a landing strip for her mouth, made you realize that she could not exist without you. She was no more real than you were, having your moment under a small fortune worth of lights and sound equipment: she was not Maria Callas; in fact, you were both manufactured for the moment: you were both cloned. The seventies was the period of the gay clones, men who had left their past (ugh: boring; straight) lives behind them and were now devoting themselves to the three D's of the Age: Dick, Drugs, and Disco. Disco was balm, for the times when nothing else could survive in your blasted out neuron area and you were so sick of dicks that you actually forgot they were attached to men. Only disco—vapid, stupid, and as the kids say, "suckey"—strangely enough could put you back together then. Clonism became a movement, one you either disdained or lunged for like a shark for a pound of hamburger meat. The clone was a devotee, what in the ancient world was called a ecstatic—he had given up all worldly possessions for the ecstasy, the rapture, of the cult. There was something pure and almost charmingly simple about him. Clones were not for "husband" relationships; being a clone was a relationship. Many clones came loaded down with past baggage that they were only too happy to jettison: small towns; stern, fundamentalist families; the dreary, intellectual weight of education. One of the most endearing clones I met had been a Franciscan brother who had given himself up totally to the three D's, but devoted most of his energy to the last one: sacred Disco. He designed sound systems and his spacious apartment was in the stripped-down disco mode popular at the time, called Minimalism. There was no comfort, no sentimentality, allowed in the place. Only pure function. And the two purest functions were sex (industrial carpeting ran up the walls, down the floors, and over all the "built-ins," so you could screw anywhere) and listening to a wall-of-sound disco sound system. I was fascinated with Jim and tried to talk with him about his religious background. "That's all over," he said, smiling vaguely. "I gave up Jesus for weed. Weed and disco." This time, I felt stupid. How could I have been so out of it? I couldn't even talk to the clones; they spoke a language that had gone past me. Often enough, I loathed it. There were moments when clonism seemed to work. But the twittering disco clones of the seventies (who ten years earlier might have been the stoned-out drugheads of the sixties and ten years earlier the dippy hairdressers of the fifties) represented to me a retreat from the rewards—the passions—of human consciousness. I had never given up on the brain. I still felt it was the sexiest part of the body and I was quickly bored with clone costumes: work boots on Madison Avenue had become another form of Guccis. To be frank, like any decent seventies person, I wanted to get my clothes off as quickly as possible. But I'm sure that was where the problem was: gays had gone a very long way in a short amount of time. There was no retreat. No refuge. But I could see that we desperately wanted one. Where was that embracing Mother we had abandoned to go into the cities; the wild Earth Father we had sought out in the woods? Where was the Church so many of us had been brought up in? God? God was supposed to see us all the time, and a lot of us were sure that He hated us. You could not just wipe out two thousand years of self-loathing Judeo-Christianity with mega-decibel disco music, no matter how much you turned up the volume. Where to turn? I had grown up in a world that wanted to know Thyself: to tune inward. Drop out and dig in. But now that my own life, the queer body that I lived in, had been thrown out to the masses and multitudes, when twits like Anita Bryant were asking for Florida hillbilly referendums to outlaw me, I recognized a new hell up ahead. It was not simply the pain of hiding and the shame of it, but it was the pain of exposing ourselves once hiding had become impossible: and to assuage that pain—that difficulty of being yourself in a hostile world—you had to chop off a little bit of yourself and . .. bury it? I started to see many of my "brothers," the queer tribe I belonged to, that Christopher Isherwood called his "kind," walking around like zombies, stumbling about from the Saint to the St. Mark's Baths. A new gay culture was happening and it was tied to escape: but as in any escape, you could wander too far off and end up floating beyond yourself. . . in a place only recognizable as dead. My friends and I kept trying to find some pattern for ourselves. None of us had boyfriends. Some of us didn't want one. I kept looking for something to latch onto. Something big and passionate: that Tristan-and-Isolde-Walt Whitman attachment that gays hunger for. Now that we had let everyone into the club—aided by that good old American desire to make money, which meant that the gay world could now be entered for a mere subway ride to the bathhouse or the disco—it seemed harder to make a connection with its members. Our "community," that word we cherished so much in the sixties, was starting to spit back into our faces. All it could see was the noise, the cheap music, the mindless cocksucking (once at the baths a man announced to me that he was "just a human vacuum cleaner for dicks"). The party had seemed to go on for too long, and we were all tired of party food, which, by its come-and-get-it content, is never real. By the late seventies the gay ghetto had been firmly established in many large American cities, replacing the hippie areas of the preceding era. It became easy to surround yourself not only with gays but with clones. Your postman, your auto mechanic, the guy who repaired your air conditioner, were all gay. But no one could find what tied them together except sex. They had no past life and what was the future: being an old queen, living off the dust of memories and a little luck in the sack now and then? We were all living off the currency of our youth and we all did wonder what would happen when that currency was used up. Some of us had utopian ideals: we would be around to support each other. We would not give up on our friends and would never form the kind of relationships that excluded former circles. (Until of course the right man did come along, who would make your old "family" look passé.) But many rejected the sum of it: they rejected the "new gay world." It appalled them. They could not give up the amazingly comfortable homophobia they had learned to suck on like a large lollipop. That there was something—even at its worst, even at its most tacky—endearingly human about the gay tribe escaped them. They would revert to the old standbys of queens: classism (meaning my "family"—or some made-up image of it—would never allow the likes of your "family" to suck my dick), racism, and simple self-hatred, which we came to learn is a basic American right. ("I hate myself, therefore, I am an American adult.") Mainstream America came to interpret the gay world (which for the most part is a commercial construct, much like Los Vegas) through the lenses of these men. Thus we have "Andrew Halloran" trying to paint the gay world in warmed-over Proustian prose in "Dancer From the Dance" and Larry Kramer writing like a pissed-off Jackie Collins in "Faggots." Something "had happened," as E. M. Forster said in "A Room With A View"—a sort of love and recognition between forbidden strangers—but we did not know where to put it, how to put it. But one thing was certain: we had done what Forster wanted us to do. He said it at the very beginning of Howard's End: "Only connect." And we had. There were now millions of us. I remembered when the entire gay movement (meaning people who might be open enough to actually associate in cold daylight with other queers) could fit in the rec room of a small West Side church. We had come out of the woodwork, bouncing and bopping to the Village People, taking off Brooks Brothers suits and putting on leather, swarming the Village and the West Side and the parks on Sundays. The seventies saw all this, snowballing, rushing . . . And then, for many of us, ending in a snap. We were suddenly waking up, with a vast hangover of reality. For some that meant Ronald Reagan's first landslide victory. Reagan, who made any seventies person's ugliest nightmare of Richard Nixon look nice (producing that weirdest of all things, nostalgia for Nixon—who'd ever believe it?), did bring, for many of us, the reality of America smack back into our faces. REALITY: that the old shits, the old, vengeful money-guard (whose fundamentalist God was the Money God), were poised again to win. They had indulged the "counter-culture" (a silly idea which said that money was not the reason for existence) long enough. The media had let us believe we'd had our way and the old guard had played along with it long enough. Afterall it was just play. But now the party was over, kids, and they were presenting us with the bill; even though we had never really been seated and had never decided what number the band was going to perform (the famous Vietnam War polka, for example). For the most part, the gays and the counter-culture had only been looking in at American power from the sidelines. Now once more, it was showing itself to us and the next generation was finding it . . . amazingly seductive. The type of kids who would have been dropping out and protesting were now desperate to work for IBM. Some of them were making delicious amounts of money in the eighties and producing another whole class of people, the Yuppies, who picked their life from a Ralph Lauren ad and didn't want to admit that the sixties or the seventies ever happened. The Yuppies wanted to return to their fantasy of the 50s cocoon, when "basic American values" (racism; the pursuit of money) were prime on the menu. But the Yuppies also had gay cousins and they were networking like hell, jockeying to take their places along side their straight relations. They were trying very hard to show that being gay was not all that big a deal. Afterall, the corporate structure, with a little nudging, could admit queers, if they never rocked the boat. Many of the new Guppies decided that they had a lot more in common with their straight counterparts than with the "old liberation" guys like me (who would not sacrifice their lives to the Money God and who still—we confessed—liked sex). With the advent of the eighties, the straights (by whom I mean the "non-gay" of every stripe) then had the opportunity to present that great Amex bill of the decade: AIDS. How quickly I saw the smirk of it. The pure, heavenly self-satisfaction. AIDS was going to be great bill queers would have to pay for our part in the seventies. For the sex, the closeness, our connections outside of the normal "business of America." Ronald Reagan and his forces, who had made "deceit" into an honest word, could not even say the word AIDS for half a decade after its arrival, but they knew exactly how to use it. They took a mindless virus and made it into a convenient mass indictment. And many queens, I quickly saw, wanted it just as well. They were sure AIDS would never hit them; they were positive AIDS was for trash. They enjoyed their comfortable closets and they weren't going to let anyone rattle the doors. They had grown up licking that poisoned lollipop of self-hatred and they were not going to let a few "liberated" queers from the tacky seventies take it away. Not when the lollipop had become a fashion accessory, an Andy Warhol-Calvin Klein specialty item of deception and social convenience. But the eighties were full of social conveniences. Of showy clothes—and even more dramatic poverty. Just as the clothes of the eighties go bigger, so did the presence of the poor. But the poor were no longer folksy and glamorous. Grape pickers and guitar pickers were out. Investment bankers were in. The poor had suddenly become revolting; we were going to blame them for everything, especially the constant class war America was waging under the term "crime." By the mid-eighties, I, who had always been poor (and gay) started to feel like an aardvark. A throwback. And I guess many of us from the seventies felt the same way. It was easy to feel apologetic about the period: the clothes compared to the drab 50s retro dreck from the Gap looked tacky. The seventies were like us, full of color and exuberance: in other words, unmistakable. The Yuppies and their cousins the Guppies wanted to forget about us, but we could not forget. Mostly there was the warmth and innocence of a period that will not repeat itself. At least I don't think it will happen for a long time—not until people start to look at each other again (how long has it been since you actually looked at people on the street?) and start to realize that we are indeed all in this life together, and that, if you are gay, there is a kind of gay "genius" behind us. Genius meaning "one of its kind." Genius meaning an original, warm, throbbing energy that connects us with each other. Yes, that was something that we learned from the seventies. And not even Newt Gingrich can make me forget it. _________________________________________________________________________________ Perry Brass, is among those pioneers celebrated (p. 215) in Professor James T. Sears' forthcoming history book, Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948-1968, to be available in mid-September. Dr Sears says that Perry Brass is "another Northern émigré... a post-Stonewall gay activist...a Savannah poet born in 1947." Perry Brass's latest book is The Harvest, a gay science-politico fiction novel that deals with a future of cloning, marketing human parts, and a rock-solid class system. It can be obtained at your local gaybookstore, through 1-800 343-4002 or on-line at Amazon.com, www.gaybooks.com, and www.adlbooks.com. He can be reached e-mail at belhuepress@earthlink.net. ___________________________________________________________________________________