Times Square today is nothing compared to how it was in the 70’s to mid 90’s, before Rudy Giuliani came in and literally cleaned up all the delicious sleaziness that the area became known for. Now, it is nothing but conglomerate-based stores to appease the millions of tourists who inhabit the most visited part of the word on a daily basis, and quite frankly it’s become an incredibly boring place to be in a space that was sexually exciting and most of all… freeing.
Starting at 11:59 PM last night and going until the same time tonight, you can experience a bit of what it was like to being around Times Square in that time, when gay porn theaters ran the muck and the thrill of “cruising” in those aspects still existed (now cruising is primarily in “app” form).
Beginning today, Dirty Look will stage its first New York edition of Sesión Continua, which is billed as a roving 24-hour queer porn theater at Video Revival, a nonprofit film-arts organization in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
This particular program will draw on the pre-VHS pornographic titles, including both gay and lesbian films, with no schedule released in advance to evoke old porn theaters in days of yore, according to Dirty Looks founder Bradford Nordeen.
“You walked in—there was no listing of what title was being shown,” he said to Art News. “You just saw what was playing.”
The goal for Sesión Continua is to somehow re-create the porn theater as a queer social space that has completely disappeared from several cities as technology has taken over in a different way. Nordeen believes that these early pornographic films were some of the earliest examples of queer representation, for and by gay people.
“They became the main approachable commercial format that queer people could use to document their life,” he tells Art News. “It was a cinema that filled the screen for an inordinate amount of time with various bodies engaging in beauty. This is where they saw themselves on screen.”
So what will be shown during its 24 hour stand? For one, the Hellraiser of gay porn, an Edgar Allen Poe adaptation, a beach film double feature, and some “lezploitation” films starting around 4PM today. This could easily be something that could flick that switch back on for the gay community, as ideas like this could embolden the younger generations to want to socialize in this sort of manner.
Is this something that you would attend or would’ve attended back in the day?