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When were the piers “cleaned up” for good?ĪIDS had a huge effect. I ride around the piers on my bike now, and it’s slick and beautiful, but any edge and most queer presence is surely gone. And some experienced it that way, but others felt it differently. Often, the person you were attracted to wasn’t into you or vice versa. It doesn’t just mean if you showed up, everyone had sex with you. I try to explain to people how competitive it was. Photographer Arthur Tress said he’d talk to people on the piers and they’d say, “Why are you talking to me? I’m not here to talk to people.” Others see it as being lonely and self-hating. There were people in the community very worried because people were getting mugged, hurt and killed on the piers, and others were celebrating pier sex because it was breaking with tradition and the standards of decorum. Plus, this was after Stonewall but before AIDS, so it was an explosion of gay sex everywhere.Įxactly. Plus, at that point, you had grown up with a sense of danger around being gay, so you fetishized dangerous sex. I think part of the appeal was that it was anonymous, and there was the thrill of the spontaneous and also sometimes getting someone maybe hotter than you normally would in a bar. But at the same time, they see it as cisgendered white privileged men having sex on the piers, but it was people from all classes. Millennials think of it as an extension of the bar scene, a wonderful time, with everyone having sex. It’s hard to convey what that world was like. And people who got mugged wouldn’t report it because they might have been in the closet. At this point, the police didn’t want to go in and arrest people. There was a guy concerned about how gay men were risking their lives. 1978 (photo by Leonard Fink) I was afraid to have sex on the NYC piers, partly because I thought you could get robbed or murdered. Self-Portrait on West Side Highway Ramp, ca. Some of the sex pictures, taken during the day, are misleading. I’d go and walk around during the day when there wasn’t cruising and sex going on. I personally never had sex on the NYC piers. There were some people having sex and cruising or sunbathing. The tendency is to refer to those buildings as “the pier.” If you said, “I went to the sex pier,” they meant they were having sex in the building on, say, Pier 46. When the boat comes to the pier, all the shipping would go in and out. They were the buildings for the shipping. So on the piers, the sex was in abandoned buildings? There was the literal use of these abandoned buildings - the warehouses were empty. The waterfront was talked about as if it were its own world - a place where a lot of nefarious activities might happen and a certain kind of freedom.