Societal attitudes about homosexuality have progressed almost as far as gay graphics.
Now that the internet has saturated the world with instantly accessible porn, these early erotic materials seem quaint--and much more conducive to fantasy.
In 1974, shortly after my junior year at Columbia, an employee of Butler Library who was a dead ringer for Cat Stevens, invited me back to his place near campus on Manhattan's Upper West Side. He said he wanted to show me an interview with William Burroughs in Gay Sunshine. I stopped trying to repress my sexual orientation that night.
Clubs like the Mineshaft and the Anvil frightened me at a time when random fucking was a political act. That fear may have saved my life.
An Italian artist I met in Central Park introduced me to Les Mouches, a private club near the old West Side Highway. Like everyone else in sleeveless t-shirts and tight, button-fly jeans on the smoky, sweaty dance floor, Al favored the "clone" look which emphasized masculinity. The thrilling night left me deeply conflicted. I wanted a boyfriend, which seemed completely out of synch with the era's hedonism.
A brief section on "love" notes there aren't many contemporary images to choose from because most gay couples kept their lives very private.
If only a photographer had been on hand the night David, my live-in boyfriend, and I crashed a black and white masked ball at the Library, where I worked from 1978 to 1983. We danced with beards and I don't mean facial hair.
But by then, AIDS already had begun stalking the Library's marble halls, claiming one of its first victims. Nobody knew what to call Spencer's illness until the New York Times published an article about gay cancer in July 1981. He was dead within six months.
David survived a decade longer.
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