Watching Gay Sex In The 70s is likely to be a different experience depending on your age: for anyone old enough to have enjoyed the gay liberation of that decade it might evoke nostalgic memories of more euphoric, hedonistic times, while, for someone of my generation who grew up with those scary public health ads on TV, it seems strange to think of a time when AIDS didn’t exist.

And what about the new generation of gay men? Will they view it as a piece of far-removed history, even though HIV diagnoses are on the rise within the gay community?

It’s likely that if someone living through the early days of the epidemic had time-travelled from 1981 to 2010 they would assume, from the low visibility of the disease in the gay media, that it had been virtually wiped out. How many gay movies can you think of from the last decade that have touched upon it?

Or is it that, after the initial films of the 80s/early 90s which earnestly tackled AIDS head on, filmmakers have shifted to featuring characters living with HIV who are people and not just an issue?

I’m not convinced and suspect that, like much of current gay culture, movies would rather just party and forget. Why focus on anything ‘unpleasant’ when we can have cute, topless twinks? And is there anything wrong with that?

I would suggest that gay films do have a responsibility to inform as well as entertain. They’re often a lifeline to lonely youngsters growing up gay away from the main metropolitan centres. They offer a window into a longed-for world and are often a first glimpse of gay life – if nobody’s using condoms in the movies, why should they?

The first movie to feature an AIDS related storyline, Buddies, wasn’t released until fours years after the headlines and this had to be made independently because Hollywood didn’t want to know – the disease only affected ‘fags’ and audiences didn’t want to see that, apparently. That all changed, of course, when Tom Hanks won his Oscar for Philadelphia in 1994.

Buddies, about a volunteer befriending a dying gay man, was made by adult filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan Jr. in 1985 after he was moved to put on screen what was happening around him. It was to be his last movie; he died two years later.

It wasn’t just at the movies where the gay community rallied round – they were the ones fundraising, educating, caring for the sick and putting money into research. As Larry Kramer says in Gay Sex In The 70s, “It made me realise the possibilities of our community.”

Gay Sex In The 70s is available on DVD now.