1970s picture of the trucks in the Village
I heard about the trucks my first summer in New York, in 1967. One of my older friends from Julius’s informed me that guys went to a certain street on the west side of the West Village “to suck cock. It’s sometimes called, ‘the Express,’” he informed me. So you might hear men say, “I’m taking the Express tonight.” Meaning, they were dispensing with all the folderol of going to the bars, and just getting down to business at the trucks.
It’s kind of hard to imagine, in this age of the very yuppified West Village (we’re talking $7 mil duplex apartments on West Street) what the area was like when it was still working class, you could buy a whole building for $70,000 (the going rate in the mid-60s), and there were warehouses along the waterfront, which necessitated working loading docks for—what else?—trucks.
The interesting thing I always thought about the trucks was that they were left open at night after they were unloaded, so guys could play in them. I didn’t actually go to the trucks until somewhat later, after I had joined the Gay Liberation Front in 1969, when GLFers used to leaflet them. This was again another interesting aspect of “the trucks,” a generic term that specifically referred to these huge open empty Mack rigs where scores of guys went to congregate and have sex. (In other words, you had “the trucks” just like you had the “tubs,” another simple term for the baths.)
Anyway, another interesting aspect of the trucks was that lots of men went to them for social purposes as well as the obvious sexual one.
