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At 12:55 a.m. on July 19, 1970, I stood under flattering red light near the back of Sporter's Cafe, nursing a bottle of Miller, trying to seem above it all. Because Boston bars were then required to close at one on Sunday mornings -- licensing laws having been rigged to remind Saturday night revelers of Sunday morning services -- last call had just been announced. People were circling the bar like shoals of fish. Men were making eye contact more and more blatantly, stopping to chat with interesting strangers.

I

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locked eyes with an exemplar of the tubercular-poet type then favored by many gay men, including me. Without blinking, he said, "Would you like to come to Cambridge for a margarita?"

"Why not?" I replied. Although I lived a few blocks away on Beacon Hill, my ability to bring home tricks was circumscribed by the presence of a straight roommate. At 25, I was just beginning to have gay friends.

The man who brought me home for margaritas introduced me to his circle of friends, acquaintances, and hangers-on. A short time later, he moved in with me. Together we explored a world of smoke-filled living rooms, cockeyed underground theater, stoned poetry readings, raucous drag events, parties where people wore caftans, parties where people wore leather, parties where people wore nothing. I recall being caught in a biker orgy, admiring the Charles River sunrise while tripping, cringing before drag behemoth Sylvia Sidney, being followed into a bathroom by Prescott Townsend, having incoherent all-night conversations with members of the Warhol crowd, waking to find multiple unexplained strangers in my bed.

My partner and I smoked a lot, drank too much, took various drugs, and had frequent extracurricular sex, sometimes in tandem. We felt powerfully alive. Permission to misbehave enriched and sustained us in ways beyond the ken of the recovery movement, the nanny state, and the morality police. We're happy to have survived the '70s and early '80s, and while we are all too aware that not everyone did, we look back on that time with few regrets.

No need for nuptials after the party

Bars that in the 1970s seemed to be Boston institutions are now gone. Immortalized by Andrew Tobias in The Best Little Boy in the World (1973), Sporter's went through a number of changes, expanding to accommodate a dance floor, offering food service, and finally, near the end, establishing an unofficial back-room play area. We thought Sporter's belonged on the National Register of Historic Places, but It closed in 1995. A sports bar called The Hill now occupies its space.

My partner and I have stopped smoking, drinking, and sleeping around, but we're still renegades at heart. We regard our access to a Massachusetts marriage license with ambivalence. Gay marriage seems fine as a matter of equity, but we've never coveted heterosexual rites of passage. Thirty-seven years into our relationship, we have no plans to marry, because owning each other was never the point, and because the notion of legitimizing a relationship that for us has been legitimate since 1970 seems redundant.