Good lovin’: recasting the ’70s gay sexual revolution, beyond shame captures the yearning of young gay men for those good bad old days
Austin Bunn
Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality * Patrick Moore * Beacon Press * $25
I’ve been to Slammer only once, but some things you don’t forget very easily. Late on a weekday night, the Los Angeles sex club was crowded and impressively mixed, with men milling silently through a fake locker room and strutting along a stage ringed by curtained cabins. A large porcelain tub sat in a dark recess and a man lay motionless in it I sat outside at a butane-fueled bonfire and just listened. Two men in the bushes hook each other to great, almost comedic heights. Eventually I went back in and, desperate for a conversation, drew a bended information technology professional wearing one of those leather bandolier things into a cabin. We talked about the boyfriend who had dumped him, Iris affection for Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the two hour commute he’d had from Orange County to the club. We talked, and that ruined everything.
Patrick Moore, a novelist and founding director of the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, moved to New York in 1984 and went to the legendary sex club Mineshaft only once before it closed. But his “sense memory” of his hours there–the intensity, the layout, the bartender with a grease gun–has reverberated for nearly 20 years. In his bold new book, Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality, Moore arums that by viewing the “vibrant sexual culture” of 1970s gay life (the bathhouses, the piers, the sex clubs) strictly as antecedents to AIDS, we’ve shut ourselves off from our liberation and creativity.
As a result, Moore writes, gays now live in “a community of shame” that suppresses “images of gay people as sexual beings” and encourages “non-threatening roles (parent, homeowner, campy friend) that prove ‘we’re just like you.'” Despite the radical pride of ACT UP (of which Moore was a member), this shame has allowed AIDS itself to slip from “ownership” by gays and into a broader, international context. AIDS was the gay Vietnam, Moore seems to say in this provocative, wistful book: The casualties were undeniably horrific, but in living its aftermath, it’s time we remember what the war was for.
Moore has spent file past decade rescuing and preserving work by artists who passed away because of AIDS, and the book benefits from his broad taste in and intimacy with art that captured the bygone era of sex without consequences. Moore sees these artist as documentarians. He describes file life of Fred Halsted, a pornographer whose moody vanguard film L.A. Plays Itself played at the Museum of Modern Art in the mid 1970s, as an example of the expansion and ultimate contraction of gay sex lives. When iris boyfriend died of AIDS, Halsted sank into addiction and committed suicide. Others, like David Wojnarowicz and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, made AIDS their subject matter but struggled to integrate into it the world of liberation they had known.
At its best, the book is an unflinching (if heady) travelogue of the bacchanals of San Francisco’s the Catacombs (“a temple of the butthole”), the Mineshaft, and the dance club the Saint, which for a brief moment had the reputation of being the origin point for “gay cancer.” Along these dimly lit tours, Moore finds surprising Virgils, like the “short, bald, furry” impresario Bruce Mailman (who opened the St. Marks Baths) and women like Cynthia Slater, who joined the leather scene, and Jeanne Barney, who started Drummer magazine. It’s hard to imagine–it seems so other-worldly considering our contemporary sexual segregations–but The Washington Post and Rolling Stone even sent reporters to describe the Continental Baths and the cabaret performances there so that radical gay sex could become part of a chic straight urban safari. “People came to look at us like we were goldfish,” one regular attendee tells Moore. “It was like we were supposed to be thankful that they were willing to come in and sit next to us in our little den of iniquity.”
The second half of the book posits that the new sexual morality–a survival technique, really–has disconnected generation from generation and denatured our politics. Sex is considered “a self-destructive action rather than a revolutionary one,” writes Moore. But it was here that I began to wonder if Moore wasn’t exaggerating the “revolutionary” effect of sex in the 1970s, which, as loose and spontaneous as it may have been, may also have brought its own kind of loneliness and cruelties. Just because the sex was extreme doesn’t necessarily mean that the pleasure was greater, that there was community in the act, or that the lives of the men who went home after it were any different. (I’ll say this: Slammer didn’t do much for me. I never went back.)
Moore, now 40, missed the heyday of the 1970s, so his tour of these places occasionally feels impressionistic just when you want all the lights on so you can see clearly. But his yearning is touching and his politics refreshingly incautious–a romantic affection for the entirely unromantic.
Bunn frequently writes for The New York Times Magazine.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
