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. The police force has previously apologised to the family for not investigating the case properly in the 1980s and failing to protect the gay community.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. White also made admissions to police officers before he was charged in 2020. White's ex-wife came forward in 2019 after hearing about the case, telling police the man had often bragged about "bashing" young gay men and had not denied killing Dr Johnson when she had asked. Police offered a A$1m (£570,000 $645,000) cash reward in 2018 for information about the case, and in 2020 the family doubled the reward to A$2m. On both occasions police found nothing to convince them Dr Johnson hadn't taken his own life.īut in November 2017, a coroner ruled he had been murdered by a gay hate gang, which led to the new investigation. In 20, coroners requested the case be reopened. It's now estimated up to 80 gay men were murdered - with many pushed off cliffs. His brother Steve campaigned for decades for the case to be re-investigated, claiming that his brother may have been murdered by homophobic gangs.