Gay Sex in the 70s is a 2005 American documentary film about gay sexual culture in New York City in the 1970s. The film was directed by Joseph Lovett and encompasses the twelve years of sexual freedom bookended by the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the recognition of AIDS in 1981, and features interviews with Larry Kramer, Tom Bianchi, Barton Lidice Beneš, Rodger McFarlane, and many others. The film uses archival footage and interviews to describe the world of gay anonymous and casual sex in the settings of discotheques, bathhouses, bars and dark rooms, Fire Island and more. Synopsis The film opens with a rapid montage of visuals that transport people back to the 1970s in and around Greenwich Village. Driving disco music of the time sets the pace. Using intimate interviews, the story of gay sex in the 1970s develops through characters such as Larry Kramer, Scott Bromley, Barton Benes, and Rodger McFarlane. These characters begin to expand the elements that were visually introduced. They talk about the public sex: the streets, the piers, and the trucks. This outpouring of sexuality is put into perspective when it is shown what gay life was like before 1969. How the political climate of the time influenced sexual expression. They discuss Vietnam, women's rights and especially Stonewall in 1969. The interviewees explore the experience of ‘Escaping to New York’. What some of the reasons they left the cities they had spent their entire lives in were, how things changed after the Sexual Revolution had begun. New York in the 1970s continued the sexual liberation birthed during the free love movement of the 1960s. Playboy magazine flourished like never before as well as more explicit rival magazines Penthouse and Hustler , the Broadway show ‘Hair’, ‘Oh Calcutta’ and the highly controversial ‘Dionysus in ’69′ were produced. There was a bombardment of sexual stimuli. For the first time in history, gay pornography began receiving widespread attention. But how did pornography compare with actual sex occurring in the seventies? ‘Couldn’t compete – life was a pornographic movie’ Rodger McFarland explains. Sex had become the great equalizer. Young men of all financial strata and backgrounds met in New York to experience a freedom of sexual expression that hadn't been known since ancient Rome. Just a few years before these same men had assumed that their futures were to be in the suburbs via the marriage altar.