Like those of us old enough to remember it, director and programmer Adam Baran knows where he was the day of the attacks of the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. “I woke up late [in my NYU dorm] — I’m always a late sleeper — and my mom was calling me, ‘There’s this thing going on at the World Trade Center,’” Baran recalled to me over Zoom last week. Somewhat disoriented, he got up, looked through the window to see bedlam, put some clothes on, and headed as far away from the area as he could, until the police sent everyone back in the other direction. He grabbed his clothes and left, and that was effectively the last time he would engage with the World Trade Center. Well, until recently.
Baran’s new short film “Trade Center,” which premiers at SXSW today, brought the filmmaker back to explore the building’s underground history as a spot for gay and queer men to cruise. Hooking up in bathrooms and beneath stairwells, business suits would convene with janitors; Wall Street types with “Jewish men with yarmulkes”; tourists with executives; and white collar with blue collar in a way that nearly transcended class and race, all away from prying eyes.
“Stop number one on a sex tour of the World Trade Center would be the men’s room on the lower level near the entrance to the PATH trains,” Miller recounts in the film, chronicling his arrival to New York in the 1970s, shortly after the modern gay liberation movement kicked off. Another voice corroborates, describing that “all the way in the back, where there were ten urinals” and that “in the middle of the day, there’d be five to seven guys just jerking off.” The film gives the impression that this kind of activity, which happened any time of day despite how bustling the building was, had been going on as long as WTC had alcoves to squirrel away in. Other hot spots included the beneath staircase leading to the parking lot, unused offices, storage rooms, rooms that required a key (which you could get from a horny employee). In these makeshift sex rooms, there was “every combination of guys there,” but everyone wanted to have sex with a suit, which made the 12th floor of the building a prime destination for hunting and cruising, requiring only the costume of your own suit, as there was no sign in procedure at the time.
