own neighborhood, I only had the scratchiest outline of what was happening around me. It wasn’t until Richard Goldstein’s groundbreaking article in the Village Voice, headlined on the cover as S&M: FLIRTING WITH TERMINAL SEX and illustrated with a photo of a mannequin head encased in zippered leather mask (ideal for asphyxiation-training purposes), that the uninitiated got a field report on the complete panoply of specific practices grappling away in the groaning penumbra—the glory holes, the golden showers, the fisting. “People brag about how many fists they can contain, and there is even an organization, Fist Fuckers of America, whose insignia, a clenched fist, adorns the Anvil,” Goldstein reported. Today, Fist Fuckers of America sounds like an apt name for whatever organization Newt Gingrich is fronting at the moment, but at the time it gave proof that pierced-cheek punks were clearly pikers compared with these pro leaguers at the punishing extremes of pain exploration—this leather guild of edgeplay. Although the S&M subcult that Goldstein depicted may have been padlocked off from everyday experience—its energy forces trapped and released behind its own containment walls, its violence consensual and ceremonialized—rough trade freelanced the night, and depending upon the kindness of strangers in the pickup scene could get you pulped. One heard unconfirmed stories of tricks roughed up by their johns, johns being stabbed and robbed by their tricks, bodies being found disposed along the piers. Sharpening the shadows were gay-bashing attacks carried out by gangs of youths, attacks not limited to the immediate radius of Christopher Street. (One horrific summer night, the gay cruising area in Central Park known as the Ramble was the site of a homosexual-hunting cull in which the serial victims were clubbed with bats. “Dialogue was sparse throughout the rampage,” Arthur Bell reported in the Voice. “Each attack was guerrilla-like—swift, and without warning. Quick clubbings, then onward to the next target.”) When the director William Friedkin started shooting Cruising in New York, a noir policier that took the first reverse-periscope look at the Crisco disco inferno, the Voice raised a ruckus and location sites were picketed, the extras who were trooping out of the bar scenes catcalled as “traitors” by waiting protesters. But for all of the finished film’s howlers (including the spectacle of Al Pacino in Tom of Finland leather drag), it nevertheless captured the dark riptides of mortal danger and paranoia in the ambiguous prey-game. In 1978, a year before filming began, a twenty-three-year-old man—a disco dancer—was found dead one morning outside the Anvil, where he had been seen earlier that evening arguing inside with another man. He had been stabbed with a chef’s knife.
The straight dating scene had its own homicidal overhang of “stranger danger.” Pop historians recall the seventies as the decade of Erica Jong’s 1973 novel, Fear of Flying, and the “zipless fuck,” impromptu, liberated, guilt-free penis-hopping a bouncy pogo ride away. It was also the year that a teacher at a school for deaf children, a twenty-eight-year-old named Roseann Quinn, was found naked in her bed, fatally stabbed multiple times in the stomach and bludgeoned about the skull with a statue of her own likeness. The assailant was a stranger she had met on New Year’s Eve in a bar across the street from her West Side apartment and taken back to her place for a one-night stand. The day after her brutalized body was discovered, the Daily News ran the headline story ONCE MORE, BACHELOR GIRLS ASK: WHO’S NEXT? Unlike so many tabloid horror stories, this one’s shock waves didn’t thin and recede with the next news cycle. They cut a neural pathway, put down tracks. Two years later, Quinn’s “sex slay” was novelized by Judith Rossner into the sensational best-selling cautionary tale for girls about town called Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a catchphrase title that captured the prowling sweet-toothed hunger that vampired inside even nice girls. And two years after the novel