1970's Gay History - The Christopher Street - West Side Highway Piers and Trucks

Greenwich Village in New York City was a homosexual’s dream come true in the 1970's and early 80's.  You could literally walk down Christopher Street and have sex as much as you wanted, anytime that you wanted to. Men fucked on the pier, in the trucks, in alleys and doorways and in bookstores, and bars backrooms, The sex was constant, boundless, free and liberating. This was after Stonewall and Pre-Aids.It was a sexual urban wildernes.  Back then Christopher Street was our version of gay ancient Rome, with the bars and clubs and bath houses that have become infamous in gay culture but also is somehow slowly being forgotten and hidden as if it was shameful and embaressing. Which, it was not.

The "TRUCKS," were parked near the docks on the West Side Highway under the then elevated Highway which is now gone along with the infamous abandoned crumbling “PIERS” where sex could be found 24/7.

During the day the “TRUCKS” were loaded with merchandise and freight unloaded from arriving ships. At night they were parked and empty and the rear of the truck would be left open. The orgies began at around 10pm - 5am, getting busy at around 2am. The area around the parked trucks was empty, dark, and dangerous which heightened the forbidden pleasures found within.

The "PIERS" jutted out into the Hudson off the West Side Highway scattered from Christopher Street up to Chelsea with the most sexually notorious ones being being the closed and no longer in use abandoned ones a few blocks north of Christopher Street.  Gay men would gather and cruise, sunbathe and party on the open docks and then venture into the skeletal remains of the forgotten PIER 48 a rotting wodden structure where sex could be had anytime of the day or the night.