I first saw Joseph Lovett’s documentary Gay Sex in the 70s last fall when it was a last-minute addition to Reeling, Chicago’s annual gay and lesbian filmfest. Now, this fascinating movie, a record of the unabashed era of free gay love in New York City (which the film dates from the 12 years between the Stonewall riots in June of 1969 to the New York Times’ first report of the ‘gay cancer’ in 1981), opens at the Music Box this Friday for a one week run. Even if you don’t have any interest in hot guys in denim shorts and other accoutrements of the Me Decade, however, you owe it to yourself to check out this movie. There’s a lot more here than meets the eye.

Gay Sex in the 70s (the title sounds like an online porn site and press materials sent via e-mail, to skirt spam filters, had to leave out both the words ‘gay’ and ‘sex’) is an homage to that rather hedonistic period when gay men, after centuries of repression (centuries!), helped themselves to each other whenever and wherever the mood struck. But this free wheeling homage, of course, comes with the foreknowledge of the scourge that hustled the gay sexual liberation offstage: AIDS and the film ends up, not surprisingly, as a bit of a cautionary tale.

This is going to be of particular interest for those lucky enough to have experienced the era, the young queers who wonder what it was like, and will be quite the eye opener for those who had no idea such goings on went on. For this was the era in which gay men claimed their sexuality loud and proud—and as the survivors of the era interviewed in the movie recall—as often and as publicly as possible. Director Lovett, a long-time AIDS activist and educational documentarian for ABC, HBO and others, gathers a terrific cast of survivors to what turned out to be a sexual holocaust. Among them are Larry Kramer, erotic photographer Tom Bianchi, Studio 54 designer and architect Scott Bromley, and my favorite, artist Barton Benes (he looks and sounds like he could be humorist David Sedaris’ older brother).

These witnesses to this unique moment in gay history share their tantalizing, sexy remembrances as we see period footage and photographs (sometimes graphically). The entertaining and thought-provoking interviews leave one with mixed emotions. They’re exhilarating and daunting at the same time. The non-stop orgy of sex on the Piers, in the backs of the trucks, in the bathhouses (including the Continental where Bette Midler got her start—vividly recalled), and in every corner available on Fire Island is awfully enticing but the realization of the aftermath that quickly followed is so terrible that any yearning is quickly wiped away. Or is it? With each recollection and subsequent image of some anonymous hot guy with one of those handle-bar mustaches wearing silk basketball shorts and nothing else the terrible pangs of nostalgia for the era (and make no mistake—Chicago had its own gay liberation going on) returned with a vengeance. Sigh. See www.musicboxtheatre.com.

With the advent of the Internet, of course, came online cruising and the chance to hook up 24/7. One of the most popular online classified communities, Craigslist came online in 1995 and has since become a worldwide phenomenon with over 100 million users each month. But a documentary getting its Chicago premiere this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center makes it clear that Craigslist is a lot more than a hook-up Web site. Director Michael Ferris Gibson got the idea of tracking the people behind the posts and in 2003 dispensed an eight camera crew to do just that. The resulting film, 24 Hours On Craigslist, includes a wide range of everything from what the press release describes as touching (‘Indian virgin seeks willing woman’) to the hilarious (‘Flogging for flowers’) to the curious (‘Heavy metal chef’) to the just plain weird (‘Prosthetic beer gut for sale’). The film also features a number of folks from San Francisco’s GLBT community including a cross-dressing rock band, a pre-op transsexual escort, a woman seeking her soul mate, another woman seeking a gay sperm donor, and ‘A Porn Star is Born’ porn actor Michael Soldier. OK now you’ve got my attention. www.siskelfilmcenter.com