Greenwich Village in New York City was a a newly sexually liberated homosexual’s dream come true in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. You could literally walk down Christopher Street in the West Village from Sheridan Sheridan Square to the piers and have as much sex as you wanted, anytime of the day or night.
There was a pay phone on the corner of 7th. Avenue and Christoper Street that would ring when a hot guy stood near it. The caller, a very handsome closeted soap actor lived in an apartment overlooking the phone booth and when the “trick” answered the and after a few questions about sexual positions an invitation might be issued to visit the actor’s bedroom.
Further down Christopher Street and abandoned for decades, the piers along the elevated West Side Highway became part of the Christopher Street gay cruising scene when men began wandering a few blocks over to the darker and seedier areas to cruise. Every pier, dark corner or loading dock in the was used for a sexual encounters.
Gay men would gather cruise, sunbathe (during the day) and party on the open docks and then venture into the skeletal remains of the forgotten PIER 48, a rotting wooden structure where sex could be had with a hint of danger on the side..
Gay men fucked on the piers, in the trucks, in alleys, doorways, bookstores, bars and backrooms, Anywhere you look on Christopher Street and along the West Side Highway today I can guarantee you that gay men fucked there in the 1970’s.
The sex was constant, boundless, free and liberating.
Back then Christopher Street was our version of a gay ancient Rome, a never-ending bacchanal with the many bars, after-hour clubs and bath houses that had once been infamous in the gay culture but now is slowly being lost, forgotten and in some cases hidden from public view as if it was shameful and embarrassing.
Where today stands a high-end Brooklyn”clothing outpost” on the corner of Christopher and Hudson streets, was once a popular gay bookstore with a not-so-secret sex grotto downstairs that was filled with sexual satyrs doing their thing 24 hours a day. And this was just one of many such places back then. Backrooms, peep shows, sex clubs, bath houses, adult movie theaters, and the Central Park rambles. It was an all you could fuck and suck buffet.
The TRUCKS were parked near the docks on the West Side Highway under the then elevated West Side Highway which is now gone along with the infamous abandoned crumbling piers.
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 trucks doors would be left open. The truck orgies began at around 10pm, getting busiest at around 2am. The area around the parked trucks was empty, dark, and dangerous which heightened the forbidden pleasures found within.
Anyone who stepped foot into the boarded-up dock terminals at the piers or to the TRUCKS to have sex were “playing at danger,” they were experiencing the thrill of breaking the rules. But there was real danger in walking on the crumbling piers, especially at night, and the men who had sex on the piers or in trucks parked nearby were risking encounters with police, gay bashers, and muggers. Arthur Bell’s 1975 exposé in the Village Voice focused on the brutal murder of a waterfront gay bar patron, (The murder of Addison Verill) warning that if you go to Pier 48 “you take your life in your hands.”
To Jonathan D. Katz, and others the piers which line New York’s riverfront serve as evidence of a lost civilization — particularly for the city’s gay community.
“This group of gay men built this beautiful utopia and inhabited it. To see 4,000 naked men laying outside on a Sunday afternoon on the piers…it’s kind of inconceivable today.
The freedom with which men lay naked in the sun or fucked in the burned-out sheds epitomized the spirit of the movement.
Raw, uninhibited, and passionate.”
May we never forget it.
.
Ah the memories…There were several areas of trucks all of which I frequented..my favorite sex bars were The Barn and The Stud which I lived right down the street from..The Trucks started way before Stonewall..I started going in the mid sixties..It was so great..you could always count on guys being there..during rainstorms-blizzards-hurricanes-you could also count on being harrased and sometimes beaten up by Miss Lily(the police)..even after Stonewall…the sex bars were also raided after Stonewall..However it was a great time of freedom and liberation after the bleak sixties..I consider myself very fortunate to have enjoyed the fruits of our activism after Stonewall..
Jerry Hoose(gay activist-sex activist)
Although I never went into one of those trucks I saw many men doing so. I was very young and very scared. I thank God I was not very promiscuous at that time in my life. I probably would be dead today. My serious sluttiness came years later in the 1990s.
I remember walking down those piers on the inside of these warehouses with my first serious boyfriend one gay pride weekend in June 1981. As we walked the length of this very massive warehouse that went out into the water towards New Jersey we passed loading dock doors on each side of us and saw nude men sunning. I get aroused to this day at that memory. It was just amazing.
One more thought:
Gay life was so fucking exciting and so fucking hot in the pre-HIV days. Most of today’s younger generation just do not know what they missed. As it was I didn’t get to experience everything but sure do have some great memories.
I well remember the gay sex action that took place in the west village. I particularly like visiting the Stud, usually meeting guys there and then taking them back to my flat for private sex. I well remember all of the backroom clubs and miss those days of liberation. Unlike then, when you actually had to meet a human being and talk (or grope), today, guys all hookup via Grinder or web sites. They do not know what they are missing !!!
Ahh, the roar of that greasepaint, the smell of those crowds…and crowds there were, the looky-looks and the shady crooks, and then there were us, on the prowl for some fun in the sun, in the shade, in the alleys and the back rooms (ahh, The International Stud)…we all had to start somewhere, and even if ’76 was a later start then some, there was always some around, wishin’ and hopin’ and very appreciative for the attentions…
you old gay fucks. You rock.
I remember these “trucks” well along the old West Side Highway route in the Village and by Jane and Washington Streets in the old meat-packing district. Men would go there late at night….and fuck in and around them until the sun came up (c. 1978-82) for me ! In those days, it also seemed a gay bathhouse would pop-up almost anywhere ! SCREW magazine had a page dedicated to them, and in their height, also (c.1978-82) there were no fewer than 15 or more all around the city The notorious ones were St. Mark’s in the East Village, Man’s Country on W.15th Street, The Club on 1st Avenue in the Bowery, Everard-Baths on W. 28th Street & Broadway, The Continental in the Ansonia Hotel, Mt. Morris Baths in Harlem, and the ESC on E. 56th St. uptown. However, tiny ones like the one in the basement of a building on Christopher Street just off 7th Avenue and one above the Keller Hotel on West Street were short lived but served the insatiable need for sex crazed gay men before the Aids epidemic hit.
I was a dancer at the Gaiety Male Burlesque 1976 – 1980. I hoofed in underground clubs in NYC: the Anvil,12 West, the Gallery, Crisco Disco, Flamingo, Paradise Garage, Studio 54, the World, Sound Factory, the Saint, the World,….I would rollerskate on the decrepit remains of the elevated west side highway with a birds-eye view of the shenanigans on the covered and uncovered piers in my book, ‘Homo GoGo Man: a fairytale about a boy who grew up in discoland.’ now available on DonnaInk & Amazon & BarnesandNoble
OMG I must have blown, I mean known you!
Crisco Disco was amazing. So few even remember of speak of it.
I haven’t seen Rollerina around for a while. Am I just missing her?
i only spottted her at Studio54. Read my book: ‘Homo GoGo Man: a fairytale about a boy who grew up in discoland.’ Amazon, BarnesandNoble, and DonnaInk.com. I was a dancer at the Gaiety Male Burlesque 1976 – 1978, which gave entre to the best discos: the Gallery, the Flamingo, Paradise Garage, the Anvil, Crisco Disco, Hurrah, Studio54, IcePalace57, Sound Factory, 12 West, the Saint, the World,… until I crashed and burned in 2004. Now I’m back: Danced till dawn to Nicky Siano from the Gallery, where I REALLY learned to dance, last Sunday at the Standard. the beat goes on………….
Oh Chipster!
I wrote extensively about my 1st hand experience frequenting the underground club scene that populated the once active Meat Market from 1976 – 1980: The Anvil, Alice in Wonderland, Crisco Disco, Mars…in my book Homo GoGo Man: a fairytale about a boy who grew up in discoland, now in a new improved 2nd edition with a more marketable cover after 4 years as a best seller. In the late 80’s, when Ecstasy was the drug of choice, there was an underground circuit called ‘Outlaw Parties’ that, pre-social media, the telephone was the means of announcing the time and place of the next party, thrown in some obscure and vacated space in NYC: the Williamsburg Bridge, a subway station no longer in use, a McDonald’s in Times Square… One night I was privy to an ‘Outlaw Party’ location and starting time where we strangers met under dangerously decrepit but still existing elevated rail road tracks that ran from 23rd Street into the West Village. Everyone expected the railway, as did the elevated West Side Highway, to be demolished. But on that night, we party revelers met a the designated time and spot to climb an existing ladder to the weed covered elevated railway, keeping vigilant about numerous gaping holes and the expectation of law enforcement agents once someone reported spotting our part dancing in the dark to a boom-box. It sorrows me to see a neighborhood that we could feel fearless in now the domain of the super-rich, with stores and restaurants selling merchandise unobtainable to our current financial status. That the elevated railway was celebrated by the historic society to preserve a piece of NYC history, open to the public as “the High-Line” is a nice gesture. But the cookie-cutter construction of architecturally generic high-end high-rise residential structures distracts from the quaint charm of the night I trespassed on the old remains of a time in history in NYC that no longer exists: it was a city dependent on the commerce of the railroad cars carrying cargo and meat markets, with neighborhoods that were affordable to call home to the working and young new pioneers to NYC.
Thankfully I came out in 1978 at 15 Thankful I got to experience visits to New York in those days. Things in this article remind me how parts of Baltimore were in PRE PANDEMIC Greatful Survivor