Though it was fraudulently billed as "the largest bookstore in America," the 24-hour establishment sold videos, toys, magazines, and lube, but we're still not even warm when it comes to what their main attraction was. Can any Wal-Mart really top all that?īarnes & Noble this wasn't. And the balcony was where revelers would sit down and feel loved. The street level was the dance floor, where sets moved, people bumped, and eternity never came. The basement was where celebs and other VIPs went to do enough coke to earn them a brochure from Betty Ford. The ultimate 1970s disco, 54 had three spectacular environs, as insiders intimately learned. I'm guessing there are a lot of guys with boyfriends who simply can't fuck strangers at home. I hear there's steamy action going on there once more. But then, amazingly enough, the birds turned to cocks again. But eventually, that all died down and the Ramble reverted to being a lovely spot for tourists to birdwatch in.
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Rd and 78 th Streets, the Ramble was sort of Manhattan's answer to the Fire Island Meat Rack-a rustic retreat which became a real-life porn movie as guys grabbed each other and went for it. Today, you might occasionally see some light frottage, but basically the Meat Rack has resorted to just being a walking route again. But those days are as gone as some of the sand dunes. The Meat Rack even provided the setting for parts of the legendary gay porn filmīoys in the Sand. It was a wanton sex site, where gays stood around getting naked and sandy-and blown (by the sand and by other guys). This sandy area between two Fire Island communities-the Pines and the Grove-traditionally was more than just a convenient walking route between the two places. J's Hangout was closed by the health department in 2002. In 1987, the place became J's Hangout, and later on, it evolved into a jackoff haven with events hosted by the New York Jacks. It was the wurst of times.Īs remembers, this cavernous club started in 1977 and had a lively backroom as an X-rated attraction.
At the Stud, the back room was a gigantic cluster fuck, with everyone grabbing, sucking, and sucking some more. I've mentioned places like this, as well as the Anvil and the Mine Shaft, where sex was king in the uninhibited, post-Stonewall 1970s. Or they'd just go to the communal room and prepare to be mass-groped. In this legendary shtupp palace in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel, males would check their clothes, don a towel, and lay down on a bed in a way that would suggest what their preference was. The Club and the Everard were hopping with gays in towels, but maybe the most famous of all was the Continental Baths (2109 Broadway), where the gays went to see Bette Midler perform-though more often, they were performing their own acts (sex acts, that is) in the rooms they rented. The former Everard Baths, now a wholesaler. It was sort of like a dirty version of the Horn and Hardart automat. Or, they simply sat there and waited for someone else to stick Gays went into a booth, stuck their business in a slot as if mailing a COD package, and then waited for someone to nibble on it. This nightspot was exactly what it sounded like. (11th Avenue between 21st and 22nd Street) In the 1950s, it was all about "necking" in the back seat but in the '70s, the spotlight was on fisting in the back of a large vehicle. In the West Village in the '60s and '70s, gays congregated in various large vehicles that had been unloaded, as it were, and were left open in the back, poetically enough. Let me bring it all back to you in a pre-Grindr whiff of Poppers and protein. Nowadays, gays have sex in their apartments-sometimes even in beds-but back in the old days, lots of gays went to all kinds of raunchy locales to carry on, from clubs to parks to trucks to bath houses.