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arrived the movie version, starring Diane Keaton, taking Annie Hall out for a walk on the wild side, a creepy, defrosted William Atherton, and a jacked-up rabbit of Method-actor jism jive relatively new to the screen named Richard Gere (whose performance turned out to be the tryout run for the studly calisthenics of American Gigolo), and directed by Richard Brooks as if he were carrying a wooden cross and crying, “Repent!” A date movie for the damned, Looking for Mr. Goodbar looked as if it had been coated from floor to ceiling with contraceptive jelly, with a perv reading Hustler in the subway train in the very first scene, one slick barfly after another vying to worm into Theresa’s panties, with Keaton’s father, Richard Kiley, bellowing like a prototype Bill O’Reilly about kids today and their do-your-own-thing attitude: “I don’t understand your crazy world—free to go to hell! Freedom! Tell me, girl, how do you get free of the terrible truth?” How do you get free from such terrible Arthur Miller–sounding dialogue? might have been the better question.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar was accorded the socially relevant deference that Miller’s plays and Stanley Kramer’s films (Ship of Fools, Judgment at Nuremberg) once received as Documents of Our Time until people sharpened up. Looking for Mr. Goodbar hammered like a judge’s gavel, rendering a guilty verdict against the zipless fuck and everything it heedlessly promoted. It wasn’t a lone psycho who killed this wayward wren, argued Molly Haskell in New York magazine; it was the Sexual Revolution and its miniskirt morals. “This is far and away Richard Brooks’s best film. It is harrowing, powerful, appalling. It may even be an important film, particularly for the media gurus who propound the glories of swinging singlehood and sex-on-demand without ever setting foot in the bars, and who remain comfortably immune from the demons that the rhetoric of liberation has unleashed. Never has the gap between the rhetoric, the exhortations to ‘control our bodies,’ and the out-of-control reality been drawn more clearly.” Pauline Kael, for whom the film had the “pulpy morbidity of Joyce Carol Oates,” agreed that Theresa’s cock-luring appointment with death (“Do it! Do it!” she orgasmically cries as the knife blade plunges into her) was intended to nail home “the consequence of living in a permissive society.” But Pauline wasn’t the impermissive type and rejected censorious browbeating dealt from a stacked deck. “Terry has been maimed; her parents have neglected her and didn’t notice that polio had affected her spine; as a result of her not having been loved enough, she is left with a scar on her back and a faint limp. It’s as if a woman [who] wouldn’t want sex unsanctified by tenderness … was crippled, psychologically flawed, self-hating.” Such tragedies happen today, as witness the murder of the young designer in the hotel bathroom at Soho House, but they’re treated in the press as individual collisions of intimate violence, not Indictments of the Times We Live In.

The threat of violence could thorn the atmosphere in New York almost anywhere you turned in the seventies, and yet I felt safer in the West Village than I did in almost any part of the city at the time. I didn’t court danger, it didn’t court me, no one had a monopoly on the night. While nipples were being thumbed under leather vests at macho-man bars, a cabaret known as Reno Sweeney (named after a character in the musical Anything Goes) was flourishing on West Thirteenth Street, a lyrical springboard for Karen Akers, Peter Allen, Marvin Hamlisch, Phoebe Legere, Andrea Marcovicci, Ellen Greene (later to excel in Little Shop of Horrors), and, for one engagement, the mummy-wrap style icon “Little Edie” Beale of Grey Gardens fame. It, along with similar showcases and piano bars, provided a melodic counterpoint to all the musclings going on, a Sally Bowles anthem call. I was living on Horatio during the summer blackout of 1977, the season that would go down in history as the Summer of Sam, on that humid night of July 13 that began as a