Documentary filmmaker Joseph Lovett is racing to get his most recent cut of his latest project, Too Hot NOT To Handle, which focuses on global warming, over to HBO. It's the end of a long day of work on this film ( which premieres this April ) and another one his production company is editing, Rock Bottom, which focuses on the rampant crystal meth epidemic. But Lovett is happy to talk about his pet project, Gay Sex in the 70s. In this sexy, thought-provoking and fascinating slice of queer life in the disco era, Lovett and his friends recall the bliss of the all-too-short decade of free love that came crashing down with the encroachment of AIDS. The film opens this Friday at the Music Box for a one-week run. Excerpts from our conversation:
Windy City Times: Your documentary resume is so varied but they're all really intense subjects: AIDS, cancer, global warming. Is that one reason why you wanted to do Gay Sex in the 70s?
Joseph Lovett: Well, I like to do difficult subjects and make them accessible. I like to do things that haven't been touched on too much or touched in a way that I think works. My team, I think, has a unique way of getting things across. I've done a lot of work on AIDS and I felt it was really important to talk about this decade that we address in the film. It's usually referred to in terms of AIDS and it had its own meaning and I feel that that's what we mined for this film.
WCT: Do you remember where the idea came from? Did you suddenly think, 'You know, I need to let people know that the 70s was a wonderful time, too?'
JL: A lot of people of my generation have thought about this but really how the film began, really, beyond an idea in my head was that Barton Benes is an old friend of mine.
WCT: OK, I loved him in the movie so much.
JL: [ Laughs. ] Who doesn't? I was over at his place one morning with my camera and we'd not done a film together at that time and we wound up talking about sex and I videotaped it and that night my lover and I had a young gay couple over for dinner. [ They were ] two very sophisticated New York guys in their early 30s and I said, 'Would you mind taking a look at this interview just to see how it speaks to you?' and they were shocked, absolutely stunned. They have no idea of what life was like in New York at that time and my partner Jim and I were shocked that they were shocked. So, I took it into the office the next day and I have a lot of young people—men and women—who work for me ( gay and straight ) and I asked them to watch it and they were all fascinated and they wanted to know more and we turned to one another and said, 'Maybe we have a film here.'
WCT: Are the interview subjects all friends of yours who came through that whole era with you? I certainly got that sense from the film.
JL: Barton is one of my best friends. Larry Kramer and I have known each other since before AIDS and Larry is the person who pushed me to get going on the early AIDS coverage when I was with 20/20 at ABC. Many of the others I've known through AIDS work over the years.
WCT: And where did you find all that wonderful archival footage and those provocative photos?
JL: Well as soon as Barton did the interview I immediately thought of photographs done by my friend Dan Eifert. He's a brilliant photographer and he used to do architectural stuff on the street that included people ( a lot of those pier photos are his ) and he made his pictures accessible to me. He recommended that I get in touch with Alvin Baltrop who I did not know and Alvin had treasure troves of photographs—many of which had never even been printed before. The motion picture stuff came from Bob Alvarez ( who's in the film ) —we were assistant editors who worked together on An American Family—and we got some footage through Steve Toushin at Bijou Video in Chicago. Steve felt that this was a very important film and made it all available to me free of charge. We also had many other photos as well.
WCT: How hard was it to rein in that free-wheeling behavior when it was apparent that AIDS was so serious?
JL: Well, I was in a relationship and madly in love so, for me, it wasn't difficult.
WCT: But that's an underpinning to the film—a longing for those hedonistic days, right?
JL: Of course. I think what happened is that some people couldn't give it up or wouldn't give it up and that's one of the things we tried to show in the film on how our sexuality had become so much a part of our identity because of what we hadn't had growing up. It's a very complicated, convoluted integration, I think, or lack of integration with sex and a sense of the future.
WCT: And one of your interview subjects actually spells it out—suddenly after centuries of repression—who wouldn't start fucking their brains out?
JL: Yeah, absolutely.
WCT: I remember later, at the height of the AIDS scare, a friend of mine used to say over and over again, 'The minute they find a cure for AIDS people are going to be fucking in the streets.' Do you think that's still true—because you've been through that period where people were doing that. Could we go back?
JL: The other night at a screening of the film in San Francisco someone said, 'You have to remember, emancipation only happens once.' I think people today perhaps don't need to be fucking in the streets because there's a certain level of acceptance that they've been brought up with. I think they need to be marching in the streets for equality.
WCT: How do you address that with the young guys who don't have the sense of history who are shocked at the behavior? Are these young guys maybe thinking twice about this insidious practice of barebacking after seeing your film?
JL: Yeah, yeah. I hope so. I've done a lot of work in AIDS education and safe-sex education and I think this is the best message about safer sex because it's about the joy of sex and the idea of happier sex with a condom, relieving the anxiety, just makes sense.
WCT: I know the film generated a lot of excitement at the various gay and lesbian film festivals.
JL: You know one thing that's been very exciting are the Q&As at the film festivals. The film's a wonderful opportunity for older and younger people to talk together and younger people LOVE hearing about sex from older people and everybody's so straightforward and totally unapologetic in the film, it really gets people to think about their own sexuality. We live in extremely repressive times among people who want to pretend that the Kinsey work never happened, they want to pretend that Freud never happened, they want to pretend that virgin marriage is a good thing.
WCT: Which is so at odds with what's happening culturally.
JL: We put so much of this stuff to bed, as it were. We went through a wonderful age of liberation that wasn't just sexual but it was a liberation of our thinking and to pretend that that never happened and to pretend that this obsession with the distortion of Jesus Christ is a good thing is pretty pathetic.
