The film was directed by Joseph Lovett[1] and encompasses the twelve years of sexual freedom bookended by the Stonewall riots of 1969 and the recognition of AIDS in 1981, and features interviews with Larry Kramer, Tom Bianchi, Barton Lidice Beneš, Rodger McFarlane, and many others.

The film uses archival footage and interviews to describe the world of gay anonymous and casual sex in the settings of discotheques, bathhouses, bars and dark rooms, Fire Island and more.

Using intimate interviews, the story of gay sex in the 1970s develops through characters such as Larry Kramer, Scott Bromley, Barton Benes, and Rodger McFarlane.

They found themselves cruising the streets, frequenting gay bars, having sex everywhere from the privacy of their homes, to the orgiastic atmosphere of the bathhouses, to semi-public sexual meeting places like the trucks and the piers.

In this new birth control age antibiotics were consumed in ever increasing amounts and as long as you were ready to party for the next weekend in the Pines, that was considered a clinical cure.

But as the late 1970s partied on, there came to be talk of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and some men privately began to wonder ‘had they gone too far too fast?’ The election of the conservative Republican Ronald Reagan in 1980 as well as Disco Demolition Night which helped bring about the decline of Disco music in the United States and the rise of the Religious Right in the early 1980s seemed to signal a backlash against the liberal atmosphere of the previous decade and the sexual revolution.

In June 1981, just twelve years after the Stonewall Riots, an article appeared in the New York Times that would soon put the brakes on this unprecedented era of sexual freedom.

While at first many simply brushed off the new reports and continued to party on, by the mid-1980s with the rising death toll it became impossible to ignore and one of the results from the new disease was the New York City Health department closing all of the gay bathhouses in 1985.