New York is not very sexy now, I don’t think. It’s wild to imagine that, New York being what it is now… Not out in public, because there was nothing like that, but you’d pick people up and go back to the cheap little hotels around 42nd Street. There would be people around there who you could have sex with. Maybe mostly between Sixth and Seventh, on the south side of the street.
#Very young gay sex porn movie#
It was on 42nd Street itself, between the movie theaters. Every month or two, they’d all be shut down. Again, it was in wrappers of some sort, but it was all laid out on tables.
Then, on 42nd Street, there were lots of places that sold gay male porn. This little old lady at the newsstand would pull this stuff up from behind the counter and sell it to her, and look at her like she was nuts. I’m sure that was just as scandalous in a different, weirder kind of way. She’d say, “I’d like a Grecian Guild, please.” It was funny, because when I first moved to New York in 1962, I lived with a man and a woman, and the woman was gay, but she thought if she asked for some of this gay porn-on my behalf-that it would be seen as normal for a woman to be asking for it. I’d go there and buy the stuff sometimes. There used to be a place in the ’60s, when I first moved to New York, that sold vintage porno in the East Village. Stonewall had sort of released all that energy. There was a whole industry of that kind of art. These magazines were essentially pictures of men with loin cloths, or jock straps, holding a javelin, and posing like some ancient Greek statue up against a column or something like that. They had plain brown wrappers, and you’d buy them, and they’d be called Grecian Guild, or something like that. Then, when I was a teenager in Cincinnati, Ohio, there was one book shop that sold, literally, under the counter, these gay books. They always had the dance belts on, but they had good legs, and beautiful asses, so that was good. I would look at pictures of ballet dancers, and always try to divine some kind of bulge. When I was a kid, there was absolutely no gay porno that I could see and no gay books that I knew of. Not enough to buy all the gay books, apparently.ĭo you remember the first gay sex scene you read in a book? There are only like 3 million of us or something. Because there aren’t that many gay people. I had both a gay writer friend and an editor tell me, “Couldn’t you just make this straight?” Do you still have to deal with the argument that your books would somehow be more palatable if they contained less sex-gay sex, in particular? Your most recent novel, Our Young Man, offers a sweeping view of a complicated gay relationship-including lots of descriptions of gay sex.