BY GERLD BUSBY | Now that I’m 85 and have just emerged from a near-death experience after major surgery, I realize that being gay has absolutely nothing to do with sex.  It has to do only with being present to myself as continuously as possible.

When I think of my past as a gay man living in New York since 1960, the year I graduated from Yale, sex was unequivocally the purpose of my life, the main reason I couldn’t wait to take advantage of the myriad possibilities in New York of being intimate with other men.  I wasn’t looking for love or companionship or even friendship; I wanted to reach an orgasm as often and variously as I could. And I did just that—in the Rambles of Central Park mostly after dark, in every local subway restrooms on the “1” line from 34th Street to Chambers, in the old loading docks along the Hudson River from the western end of Christopher Street north to 14th Street, in the vast men’s room on the lower level of Grand Central Terminal (at the urinals and in the small dressing rooms), in the vast darkness of old run-down movie theaters on 42nd Street and 8th Avenue in the West 40s and 50s, and in the backs of empty delivery trucks parked on the west side of Greenwich Village.

All these were alluring arenas of slip-and-slide sex performed in all possible physical positions with and without any clothes.

As I write about this now it seems that all that outdoor sex was sheer theatricality, unique to the city of New York at that time in its history. It was sex as outdoor performance. The performers were the audience. How gay is that?

And all these events that took place in rooms and trucks were characterized by denseness—Hot young men were crowded together, pressed against each other in improbable public spaces barely large enough to contain them, anonymous intimacy at its most incongruous.

When occasionally I’d see someone more than once in the privacy of his or my apartment, the development of companionship and love would succumb to the unbridled adventure of well-rehearsed theatrical sex. This led easily to the abandon of reason and caution that made me and many other gay men of my generation susceptible to the ravages of AIDS.

Then, especially as my career as a creative artist evolved, I made relationships with men that developed into love and supported my art. One of these relationships, mine with Samuel Byers, became paramount in my life, and our life together for 16 years, before gay marriage, was close, trusting, and totally supportive of each other.

Although I can’t say that I truly regret the hedonism of my youth, I am deeply touched by the new sense of social responsibility that has come with gay marriage. I have wonderful friends now, newly married, who love each other. Their consistent passion and responsibility bring tears of joy and gratitude to my eyes. And I now have male friends, some of them 40 years younger than I, whom I love with more abandon than I’ve ever loved anyone. There are no orgasms, but there’s a freedom of communication and sharing I never knew.

What a wonderful life I’ve had.

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