![]() They had sex on the brain - and the elbows, and the shins. One gentleman estimates that on any given night thousands of men would show up in the West Village. (Beds, presumably, were too bourgeois.) Scores of archival surveillance-like photographs are provided of men spied through windows and doors having sex with each other. Lovett gets a handful of the era's survivors to regale us with memories of anonymous public sex on the West Side piers and in bathhouses, abandoned buildings, the backs of bars, and the unlit carriages of trucks. Knowing that death and disease are in the offing tinges the folly with gravity. The film's time frame goes from the 1969 Stonewall riots to the arrival of the first AIDS cases in 1981. Yet despite the retrospective sensationalism, Lovett's 70-minute documentary is a sobering anti-erotic cautionary tale. Sex, then, was an intramural sport, and the film manages to look back on all the play-by-plays with fondness and pride. ''Gay Sex in the '70s," a ''steamy romp by Joseph Lovett," recaps who did what with whom on which drug how many times a day. Thirty years ago, Manhattan's West Village was a funhouse for anonymous trysts between men in short shorts and big bushy mustaches.
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