Gay Sex in the '70s

Not too long ago, while trying to grump over their rate changes and the seemingly schizophrenic decisions of its CEO, I streamed a documentary from Netflix entitled Gay Sex in the '70s. Interesting title—but to be honest, it was one of those documentaries that any gay guy who’d actually had sex in the seventies could have written himself. Start with Stonewall, mix in ample tales about hedonistic fucking in dark places, sprinkle with references to Studio 54, then gently and sadly deflate with oral histories from tired-looking older gentlemen that all end with sentences like, But you know what? Five years later, everyone at that orgy was dead.

One of the things the film reminded me of, however, was how central and even vital cruising was during my teen years. Most of what I learned about cruising—that silent art form in which two men communicate their desire for each other through non-verbal cues—came from a book I found on the shelves of the uni library at the university where my parents both taught. Deep in the Library of Congress classification’s HQ section, it was, in a remote corner of the third floor. I would check out the subsection on homosexuality through the gaps from the next aisle, then make a selection and dash around the corner to grab it and escape to a study carrel before anyone could see me.

What I chose more often than any other title was a yellow hardback volume. It was the Bible of my horny teen years. I can’t recall the name or author, and trust me, for years I’ve Googled around to find it without success. But simply put, it was a step-by-step guide for the modern gay guy of the nineteen-seventies to cruise for sex.

It told one exactly how to recognize a fellow cruiser by eye contact alone, and made suggestions for pausing in the street to gaze at a garden or a window display, in order to ascertain if the other guy looked over his shoulder for another peek. It detailed the ritual of courtship that took place in cruisy public restrooms. I already knew much of that from exploration, but the rest I soaked up, learning in an academic and theoretical sense exactly what went on in such exotic spots never glimpsed in small-town Richmond, like a gay bathhouse, or an adult bookstore.

All that information helped me. It really did. It taught me the significance of a man locking eyes with me for a few fractions of a second longer than normal, and of especially what it probably meant when his glances became a pattern that meant more than Hey, that guy has a smudge on his face. I learned to pick up on subtle cues that only a minority of us recognize—a man’s lingering glance that trailed from my eyes down to my crotch back in those days communicated attraction more compellingly than any instant message online now. Throw in the slightest tilt of the head to the side, so that the man was looking at a slight angle behind me, and I knew it was my ass he was after. If his hand oh-so-casually dropped to his belt and hung there, his fingertips touching the bulge in his pants, I knew he wanted to draw attention there; if he attempted the riskier brush against his cock with the palm of his hand, or the seemingly-routine package adjustment, I could guess that we would be finding somewhere quiet to fuck within moments.

Simply by observation, I became so attuned to certain behaviors that I could tell from across a crowded room when a man was checking me out. I knew (probably better than they did) which teachers at school wanted me, which of my parents’ colleagues were gay, and even who was checking me out from their cars. And in a broader sense, I became intensely aware of who was looking at whom, straight or gay. What boys the girls wanted, because of their stares. What faces men liked to rest their eyes upon, when they thought they were unobserved and could take in the sight of something pretty. By close observation of who they glanced at, for how long, and how many times, I could tell who any one of my parents’ students might be into, or what secret longings for others the adults around me had.

That yellow book, and the cruising it inspired, were a crash course in human behavior. It made me a people-watcher, and someone who made inspired and informed guesses at the motivations percolating behind guarded gestures and furtive glances. By teaching me to observe, that education made me an artist.

Within about three years after it hit the shelves, that book had become battered, its spine broken and illegible from the hundreds of people like me who read it over and over again. By the time I went to college in 1981, it, like so many of the people in the Netflix documentary, had become another casualty of the seventies. Or as the card catalogue said, volume missing.

I wish I remembered its title.