Downtown gay protest in 1984 signaled end of the Golden Age of Sex

The Golden Age of Sex began around 1966 and ended in about 1983. Sex was a lot less fun and harder to get outside of those years.

The first step towards the Golden Age of Sex occured in the early 1940s when scientists at Oxford University created a method of mass producing mold that cured venereal diseases. US authoritiezs legalized the birth control pill in 1960, with Canada waiting a full decade to follow, although Canadian women who wanted The Pill had all found a way to get their doctors to prescribe it well before that.

The Golden Age of Sex ended in about 1983 when the HIV-AIDS virus forced people to become more conservative in their sexual practices. Authorities exagerrated the dangers AIDS held to heterosexuals, not unlike the way they more recently exagerrated the threat of covid to people who aren't aged over 80 and obese.

So those who lived between 1966 and 1983 were blessed to live through the best time in history.

These photos, taken of a protest held in downtown Montreal on 3 June 1984, demonstrate a joyous affair, but in fact it can also be seen as the mourful ceremony burying the best era in human history. The demonstrators took the the streets after police rounded up 188 men in a gay club known as Bud's for doing whatever they did inside the gay club.

(Bud's, next to the Chez Paree, was named for veteran barman Bud Miller, who had previously worked at the Swiss Hut. It was a gangster hangout in the 1960s frequented by psychotic thugs like James MacDonald who once lost his temper and chopped off the fingers of a guy he was arguing with inside the place.)

The irony in these La Presse photos is that the men were fighting for a lost cause, as the Golden Age of Sex had ended, most notably for their demographic, about one year earlier. The other irony is that they were fighting for the right to have a gay club downtown. Montreal gays moved their action east to the gay village soon after, permanently vacating their grip on their downtown turf and partitioning themselves off into cheaper real estate further east.

We salute these fellahs and their moustaches for having a helluva good time and fighting for the ecstasy of adult, consenting, human sex.