“They were the candy store years because there were drugs, stardom, the pill. I met a couple of girls in bed more than once, and I had sex in public places, like Studio 54.” — Dustin Hoffman, quoted in a Studio 54 piece on colorized.com.
The original Schrager-Rubell version of Studio 54 opened on 4.26.77 and closed on 2.3.80. Hoffman turned 40 on 8.8.77.
From HE review of Matt Tyrnauer‘s Studio 54 (“The Way It Was“), posted on 1.22.18: “Bob Calacello or somebody mentions how Studio 54 happened in a glorious period in American culture that was post-birth control and pre-AIDS. The film explains how liberal sexual attitudes were particularly celebrated by urban gay culture, which was just starting to sample freedoms that today are more or less taken for granted. Guys couldn’t hold hands on the street but they certainly could once they got inside Studio 54.
“But one thing you can’t say in today’s climate (and which Tyrnauer’s film doesn’t even mention in passing) is that the ’70s were also a glorious nookie era for heterosexual guys. It was probably the most impulsive, heavily sensual, Caligula-like period (especially with the liberal use of quaaludes) to happen in straight-person circles since…you tell me. The days of Imperial Rome?
“This kind of thing is now a verboten topic, of course, with the 2018 narrative mainly being about how guys need to forget ‘impulsive’ and turn it down and be extra super careful in approaching women in any context. But things were quite different back in the Jimmy Carter era. I’m not expressing any particular nostalgia for those days, but the new Calvinism of 2018 couldn’t be farther away from what the social-sexual norms were 40 years ago. Just saying.”