What is it like to be gay in the 70's and 80's

[IrishBoi]

I have seen a lot of movies, tv shows and documentaries about the cruising times of the 70s and 80s both pre and post HIV

I know there was a lot of cruising going down, big cities like New York City were no stranger to bath houses, saunas, book stores and leather bluf Tom Of Finland cops walking down the street like nothing. 

Unless thats just the magic of film making it look like that. 

I was unlucky to not be born until 1999 so to anyone who was around the cruising scene back then, how was it and is it as accurate as you see on tv/film

[BootmanLA]

3 hours ago, IrishBoi said:

I have seen a lot of movies, tv shows and documentaries about the cruising times of the 70s and 80s both pre and post HIV

I know there was a lot of cruising going down, big cities like New York City were no stranger to bath houses, saunas, book stores and leather bluf Tom Of Finland cops walking down the street like nothing. 

Unless thats just the magic of film making it look like that. 

I was unlucky to not be born until 1999 so to anyone who was around the cruising scene back then, how was it and is it as accurate as you see on tv/film

A few things to note:

1. The way it was in really, really big cities like NYC, London, Berlin, Los Angeles, etc. was not typical of how things were in the rest of the world, or even the rest of the countries involved. The vast majority of people - gay and straight - lived in places where there were not only no leather studs cruising the streets, but gay bars were still under constant threat of being shut down as public nuisances, and that was BEFORE HIV/AIDS hit the community. In plenty of "liberal" cities, gay bars still had door buzzers with someone watching on a CCTV camera from inside, only letting in people who appeared to be "safe" to let in.

I didn't mention San Francisco because although it was also a very liberal and liberated city, it's actually not a "really big" city. The SF Bay area is large and has a huge population, but the city itself - where the gay community was based - is not all that large (less than 47 square miles) and the city population was only about 700,000 people in the mid 70's. 

2. Once HIV/AIDS hit, things changed, rapidly - in many places, bathhouses were shut down, public cruising enforcement stepped up, and much of the "goodwill" that we'd enjoyed as a byproduct of the Sexual Revolution era evaporated. That didn't stop people from going out to bars, etc. - but there was a pall hanging over everyone, as this unknown disease/killer was out there and for a few years, at least, we had no idea what it was or how it was doing what it did. And even when science became sure it had to be a virus, there wasn't a test available to even determine if one had been infected.

Once there WAS a test, results from those willing to be tested indicated that in some of those large cities, fully half of the gay male population was HIV+. At a time when there were no medications that could even slow the virus down, much less repress it to undetectability. And for many years, the alt-weeklies in those big cities (which were the only form of mass communication in the gay community anywhere close to "real time" were full of obituaries, every week, of members of our community dying.

3. You say you were "unlucky" to be born so late, in 1999. If you'd been born in, say, 1960, making you 20 in 1980, and you'd lived in one of those big cities, by today you'd very likely have been dead for more than 30 years. That's the reality.

[scarnick]

I met my husband in 1975. I was 24 and her was 35.  I was cruising (a small city in Pennsylvania.  I gay bar and an adult book store. )  It was a normal Friday night. At 1 AM  we connected when he got off work.  He was my third trick that night.  The first one turned out to be his best friend.