NYC Taxpayers Paid for Perverted Film that Fondly Recalls Homosexual Orgies in Public Restrooms in World Trade Center Towers Before 9/11 Terror Attack

Short gay ‘cruising’ documentary funded by ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio arts grant celebrates “meaningful public sex encounters” in WTC bathrooms, stairwell

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WARNING: Contains graphic, offensive and crude descriptions of male-on-male sodomitic acts.

By Peter LaBarbera, AmericansForTruth.News exclusive, November 16, 2022 [reprint information at bottom]

STORY ESSENTIALS (full story is after jump):

• A New York City government arts program launched in 2021 by former Democrat Mayor Bill de Blasio gave a $5,000 grant to a homosexual filmmaker for a salacious short film, “Trade Center.” The film [see full transcript below] fondly reminisces about secret gay men’s orgy spaces in the World Trade Center, e.g., public restrooms and staircases before the twin towers were destroyed by Islamic terrorists on September 11, 2001.

• The eight-minute “documentary” by homosexual filmmaker and pornography site writer Adam Baran gives an oral history “sex tour” of the pre-9/11 WTC complex. It fondly remembers gay “cruising” sites at the twin towers where men would meet furtively to engage in deviant sex acts with other men. Creator Adam Baran writes: “our five subjects describe their memories of meaningful public sex encounters in each [orgy] location.” The film’s narrator speculates that men who were “cruising” for anonymous sex in the buildings perished when the towers were hit.

• The taxpayer-funded “Trade Center” was released on Vimeo September 7, 2021, coinciding with the 20^th anniversary of the Al-Qaeda terror attack targeting the twin towers that took nearly 3,000 innocent lives in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.

• “Cruising” for homosexual, impersonal “public sex” in restrooms, parks, etc., predates the modern, post-Stonewall-riots, political gay-rights era. It is less common nowadays with the rise of digital phone apps like the GPS-assisted Grindr that efficiently cater to horny homosexual men seeking instant, anonymous, sodomitic hook-ups with other men nearby.

• This libidinous, hyper-promiscuous side of male homosexual sub-culture is rarely covered by the dominant, “mainstream” media, which focuses primarily on the cultural visibility and political “rights” aspects of the LGBTQ+ movement. Historically, high-risk, anonymous sex has been downplayed by “gay” activists trying to mainstream homosexuality. Nevertheless, it is linked to rampant STDs and health maladies among “men who have sex with men” (MSM). For example, the recent monkeypox viral outbreak, which overwhelmingly affected gay and bisexual men, is specifically linked to men who had “multiple sex partners” with other men, often at orgiastic gay sex parties accompanying LGBTQ “pride” festivals. 

• The pro-pornography Baran views “Trade Center” as an important historical work covering a segment of “gay” life. What he calls “meaningful public sex” is part of the Left’s “sex-positive” agenda, which eschews any moral limits to sexual behavior. The film’s raunchy subject matter did not stop it from receiving plaudits from “woke” film groups and the video streaming company Vimeo, which bans Christian ministry’s and church videos that oppose homosexuality. Another short film by Baran features a 14-year-old boy who is spurred on by a gay porn star in his quest to secure homosexual pornographic magazines.

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FULL STORY:

By Peter LaBarbera, AmericansForTruth.News; 11/15/22 [reprint information at bottom]

In the run-up to the 20-year anniversary of the horrific September 11, 1991 Al-Qaeda terror attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center towers and almost 3,000 innocent lives, most media offered touching remembrances of the victims by their families and friends. Among those victims were more than 400 New York-area cops and firefighters who died trying to save stranded people in the crumbling, scorched towers.

But one homosexual New York City filmmaker, Adam Baran, took a novel—some would say twisted—approach to commemorating the somber September 11^th anniversary. Baran’s short film, “Trade Center” [see trailer on YouTube HERE], dwells instead on the homosexual, anonymous-sex “cruising” spots located inside the World Trade Center skyscraper complex before it was reduced to rubble by Islamic terrorists flying commandeered passenger planes.

“Trade Center,” just eight-minutes long, features audio interviews with five homosexual men fondly recollecting the various “cruising” restrooms and stairwells— “orgy rooms” —inside the pre-9/11 World Trade Center complex, where they and fellow men “in-the-know” would gather to sodomize each other in quick, anonymous encounters. This deviant behavior is euphemistically celebrated by many on the Sexual Left, especially anti-establishment LGBTQ devotees, as “public sex.”

The pro-pornography Baran, ex-editor of the raunchy, online homosexual magazine BUTT, describes “Trade Center” on the movie site IMDB as follows:

“The voices of five gay men who cruised for sex at the World Trade Center in the 1980s and 1990s haunt the sanitized, commerce-driven landscape that is the newly rebuilt Freedom Tower campus. Shot over the course of one day in late February 2020, Trade Center takes viewers on a tour of the former financial hub, which was destroyed during the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. 19 years later, we traverse a bustling new ecosystem while our five subjects describe their memories of meaningful public sex encounters in each location.”

Taxpayer-funded “art” glorifies perversion

Baran’s film was subsidized by New York City taxpayers through a new program that gave $5,000 grants to 3,000 local artists affected by the Covid pandemic. In May 2021, (Democrat) Mayor Bill de Blasio and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs announced the formation of City Artist Corps, which awarded $25 million to grantees, including Baran and his “Trade Center” project.

“Trade Center,” viewable on Vimeo HERE [see full film transcript below], gives a “sex tour of the World Trade Center,” and begins with these words narrated by Billy Miller, himself the editor of a homosexual pornographic print magazine titled “Straight to Hell”:

“Back in the late 1970s, every public restroom, secluded park, roadside stop, was a potential or actual orgy room.

“I stumbled upon several hot spots within my first few days in New York City. There weren’t any cameras or anything like that, and they were just open 24 hours a day. One such spot was most definitely the World Trade Center.”

Baran apparently uses “trade” in the film’s name as a double-entendre, since “trade” in the gay slang of the ‘70s referred to secretly homosexual casual sex partners. Bruce Rodgers’ 1972 “dictionary of gay slang,” Gay Talk, defines “trade” as a “nonreciprocal sex partner, usually straight.” Another homosexual writer, sociologist Laud Humphreys, defined “trade” as “tricks” [sex partners] “who do not, as yet, consider themselves homosexual.” [Laud Humphreys, “Tearoom Trade: Impersonal sex in public places,” p. 47]

Men’s restrooms become gay orgy areas

There is nothing in “Trade Center” remotely critical of the makeshift homosexual orgies that took place (illegally) in the iconic New York skyscraper complex, undeterred by occasional police interruptions. Quite the contrary: the film’s subjects cherished the memory of their secretive sodomitic encounters in otherwise public spaces (including restrooms frequented by boys). Here is a transcription of a segment from the beginning of the film:

NARRATOR BILLY MILLER: “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 [Port Authority Trans-Hudson] trains.”

ANONYMOUS MAN INTERVIEWD FOR FILM: “It was a massive station with…restaurants and bars, and all the way in the back was the…big-ass bathroom with probably ten or so urinals on either side, and middle of the day there’s five, seven guys just standing there jerking off [masturbating] in the stalls–everyone from blue-collar folks to guys in three-piece suits.”

MILLER: “Lunch hour was typically out of control, and the cops would periodically try to bust it up by standing around for a while with their walkie talkies turned up loud for effect. Or they’d knock a nightstick on the stalls and bark something like [in deep voice], ‘Okay, ladies, time to break it up.’ But the minute they’d leave, the boys would be back at it.”

MAN: “Nobody was worried at all about being busted. That gave us a sense that it was our space.”

ANOTHER MAN INTERVIEWED: “Pretty much any time of day you went, there was something going on.

Here is another portion of the film. Note to the uninitiated: “tearoom” is a gay slang term for sexually “cruisy” public restrooms (derived from British slang linking “tea” to urine):

NARRATOR MILLER: “… And it was completely anonymous. For the more in-the-know. For the more in-the-know there were other, more private restrooms, and in those tearooms there’d often be more leisurely [f—king] and sucking going on [describing homosexual sodomies].

INTERVIEWED MAN #1: “Everyone wanted to be with the Wall Street men, because they had so much money. That’s why one of the biggest cruising areas was the 12the floor of the World Trade Center.”

INTERVIEWED MAN #2: “Back then, you didn’t have to sign in, so it was quite easy to go into the World Trade Center.”

MAN #1: “The best way to do it would be just in a suit. I walked into the elevator, went up to the 12th floor. I walked into the restroom. And there was, like, six, 12 guys, all getting blowjobs [oral sex]. There were a couple guys getting [f–ked] [sodomized] and all the time, everybody was in suits, which made it even hotter. There were three occasions I did that, and all three occasions, I walked in and it was just, like, it was that way. It was wild.”

Trade Center’s narrator Miller and the men interviewed go on to excitedly describe the homosexual sex “cruising” in the underground stairwell of the Twin Towers:

NARRATOR: The thing about that stairwell that made it so popular was that the cops never patrolled it, and you could hear someone coming from several floors above or below. Basically, nobody took these stairs except horndogs who used it as a secluded sex spot.

MAN #2 DESCRIBING STAIRWELL ENCOUNTER: “I went up to him and he went up a couple of stairs higher and unzipped his pants, and I started sucking him. He grabbed my hand and pulled me a few stairs up so that my [penis] was now at his mouth level. We kind of continued that rhythm to make it easier, given the geometry of sucking cock in a stairwell.”

The film ends with an appeal to emotion as the narrator speculates that men who were engaging in homosexual sex acts in the various “orgy rooms” at the World Trade Center perished when the terrorists struck the towers with hijacked planes. Narrator Miller states:

“I’ve talked to at least one guy who was there in one of those tearooms when the planes hit those buildings. My mind visualized that happening, and it’s impossible that all those other people could have gotten out.”

This idea, that the 9/11 attacks killed men in World Trade Center “tearooms” while they were engaging in secretive, yet public sexual romps is what motivated Baran to make “Trade Center” to recover lost history of sorts. He told Interview magazine:

“I’d always been obsessed with cruising, particularly because it’s this silent language with all these hidden rules that you have to figure out on your own. I was also really fascinated by the idea that there may have been people who were cruising in the World Trade Center when the towers were attacked on 9/11. It was interesting that the mythology of 9/11 actively erased this whole other part of the story of the World Trade Center.”

Note how Baran faults media for not telling—indeed, he says erasing—the story of homosexual-sex “cruisers” at the WTC. “Trade Center” is based on an essay by narrator Miller (written under a pseudonym) titled “The Towers of Cum & Horndogs of Yore,” in a book called Petite Mort: Recollections of a Queer Public. (Petit Mort is a French idiom for orgasm.) The 2011 book is filled with stories, mostly by men, with a few lesbians, sharing pictures and descriptions of their deviant homosexual encounters in public places like Central Park in New York City.

Vimeo’s curious ethics

Baran uploaded “Trade Center” to Vimeo on September 7, 2021, four days before the two-decade anniversary of the Al Queda terror attacks that changed the American political and cultural landscape forever. The video streaming company honored the short film with its “Staff Pick” award, and by permanently hosting it online.

As an indication of the deep (and anti-Christian) biases that dominate Vimeo and countless other “woke,” pro-LGBTQ corporations, the same Vimeo in 2017 closed the account and took down all 850 videos of a Christian “ex-gay” ministry, Pure Passion, founded by ex-homosexual David Kyle Foster. Pure Passion’s wholesome videos featured testimonies of men and women who overcame homosexual or other sexually sinful desires through their faith in Christ, and went on to live in line with their biblical moral values.

Vimeo reportedly told Foster and Pure Passion:

“To put it plainly, we don’t believe that homosexuality requires a cure and we don’t allow videos on our platform that espouse this point of view…We also consider this basic viewpoint to display a demeaning attitude toward a specific group, which is something that we do not allow.”

Thus, due to the tremendous power of “gay” and “trans” activists, Vimeo bans as “demeaning” to LGBTQ-identified people any videos defending the historic, Judeo-Christian belief that homosexuality is sinful and changeable behavior. Meanwhile, it celebrates and platforms edgy, “gay”-positive content, including Baran’s film glorifying “public sex” between men, i.e., men sodomizing each other in public restrooms open to people of all ages.

Since “de-platforming” Foster’s ex-gay video ministry, Vimeo has reportedly taken similar hostile actions against a Christian church and other pro-traditional-morality groups. For a sample of Vimeo’s punitive actions against pro-family sites, go to this LifeSiteNews search page.

Other awards and recognition

Beyond Vimeo, “Trade Center” has received awards and special recognition by various independent- and LGBTQ film groups, including the prestigious American Film Institute, as well as media such as GQ magazine and the aforementioned Interview magazine. The following are among its awards:

• AFI Docs 2021 (American Film Institute documentaries): Nominee, Grand Jury Prize, Short Documentary
• Vimeo: Staff Pick
• SXSW (South by Southwest 2021 Film Festival): World Premiere; nominee, Grand Jury Award, Documentary Short
• Oak Cliff Film Festival 2021: Special Jury Mention
• Frameline45 (San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival): Official Selection
• Rooftop Films Summer Series: Official Selection
• North Bend Film Fest 2021: Special Jury Award
• OUTFEST Los Angeles 2021: Official Selection

Adam Baran: “queer” radical, pro-gay porn for teens

Baran is an unapologetic, pro-pornography, self-styled “queer” sex radical who, like many on the “sex-positive” Left, bemoans the “commercialization” of the present “gay”/LGBTQ movement (think: large corporations sponsoring annual “Pride” parades nationwide). In the eyes of such radical-sex “purists,” the “mainstreaming” of “gay” came at the expense of celebrating the actual (deviant) subversive sex culture that once defined the movement and made homosexuals “sexual outlaws.”

As can be seen from the film transcript below, “Trade Center’s” narrator criticizes the post-9/11 environment in New York City in which then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani cracked down on the city’s sleazy sex businesses, like strip clubs and gay bars with orgy-enabling “dark rooms,” to reduce crime and improve the living quality of the city’s residents.

Baran produced a Netflix documentary, “Circus of Books” (2020), which sympathetically and non-judgmentally tells the story of a “religious” Jewish couple that owned a homosexual bookstore near Los Angeles. The now-shuttered bookstore also produced hard-core gay porn films for sale. The couple’s son comes out as “gay,” causing his mother angst but eventually leading her to become an LGBTQ advocate. No connection is made between the son’s new sexual identity and his parents’ homosexual pornography business. 

Another Baran short film, “Jackpot” (2012) [see trailer on YouTube], features a secretly homosexual 14-year-old boy who risks getting beat up by classmates to grab a stash of gay pornographic magazines thrown away in a local dumpster across town. In the film, teenager “Jack Hoffman” is urged on by the gay porn star of his masturbatory fantasies, “Ricky Swayze,” who comes to life as if off the cover of one of the magazines Jack is trying to possess. The boy ultimately succeeds in his quest, and ends up lying on his bed in his room with a bruised eye gazing at the magazine with Swayze on the cover.

Baran told the Huffington Post that “Jackpot” was, in part, “about how our erotic materials help gay men understand who they are — even if sometimes it leads them to form the wrong impressions about what sex is actually going to be like.”

The hyper-promiscuous world to which a large portion of supposed “gay” teen boys like “Jack” are inducted celebrates multiple-partner and assorted perversions on such a scale that few outsiders could scarcely conceive of its depravity.

Baran has written for the homosexual porn site The Sword, celebrating various porn producers and gay porn stars. In one interview he champions the creator of a “Dad” series of “incest-themed films.” Reviewing an animated porn film about a man tasked with cleaning up bathhouses (gay sex clubs), he writes: “As gay men, we love going to cruisey gay bars, sex clubs, and bathhouses. But there’s a dirty, somewhat icky side to the bathhouse experience – namely, who’s gonna clean up the mess afterwards?”

In a sympathetic piece in the online GQ Magazine titled, “The Secret Gay History of the World Trade Center”), Baran explained the “gay” divide between celebrating deviance and cultivating “respectability”:

This cleaning up of gayness, gay spaces, and gay culture is familiar to lots of queer people, Baran [said]: “We know the earliest queer movements in our country, from the queer liberation movement to the pre-liberation movement, that there’s this ongoing tension always between the forces of who are respectable and want to say ‘if we just show society that we’re good and that we can be good citizens, they will let us in’,” Baran began. “And then there’s the other people who are saying, ‘We don’t want to be a part of that dominant society: that dominant society does horrible things, it promotes wars, it’s racist, it’s classist, and we want to show solidarity.’ And the gay movement from the ‘60s on, that was kind of the split.”

As for Baran and his ilk on the Sexual Left, there appears to be few limits on just how unrespectable, debauched and filthy gay “sex” acts can become without losing their support. Incest (porn), sadomasochism, and (eroticized) degradation are mere “fetishes.” For example, among Baran’s online published articles on a gay pornography site is a sympathetic interview with an extreme homosexual “masochist,” an older man who took a job as a janitor so he could venture to local restrooms. The man fetishizes getting urinated on by the “jocks” who use the facilities.   

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“Trade Center” film transcription:

WARNING: Film contains graphic and offensive, crude descriptions of male-on-male sodomitic acts

Editor’s Note: the men interviewed for the film were not identified, so in the transcription below I have attempted to separate them apart by the sound of their voices, labeling them Man #1, Man #2, etc.–PL

Link to film on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/599696591

NARRATOR (BILLY MILLER): Back in the late 1970s, every public restroom, secluded park, roadside stop, was a potential or actual orgy room.

I stumbled upon several hot spots within my first few days in New York City. There weren’t any cameras or anything like that, and they were just open 24 hours a day. One such spot was most definitely the World Trade Center.

Back in the day, I met a very experienced guy who marked up my subway map with various hot spots and told me what time of day or night was the best for each location.

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 [Port Authority Trans-Hudson] trains.

ANONYMOUS INTERVIEWED MAN #1: “It was a massive station with…restaurants and bars, and all the way in the back was the…big-ass bathroom with probably ten or so urinals on either side, and middle of the day there’s five, seven guys just standing there jerking off [masturbating] at the stalls–everyone from blue-collar folks to guys in three-piece suits.”

NARRATOR: Lunch hour was typically out of control, and the cops would periodically try to bust it up by standing around for a while with their walkie talkies turned up loud for effect. Or they’d knock a nightstick on the stalls and bark something like [in deep voice], “Okay, ladies, time to break it up.” But the minute they’d leave, the boys would be back at it.

MAN #2: “Nobody was worried at all about being busted. That gave us a sense that it was our space.”

MAN #1: “Pretty much any time of day you went, there was something going on.”

MAN #2: “I remember meeting a guy in that bathroom who seemed like he was just coming off of work, you know, in a white shirt with a vest of some kind and half a name tag visible. I, like, pushed him into a stall, and we went at in that bathroom.”

NARRATOR: There was every combination of guys there: from workers, delivery boys, shop workers, executives, tourists, random dads.

MAN #3: “But it was pretty hot, because it was a mixed crowd of, like, Jewish men in yarmulkes, and Black and Latin and Asian, blue-collar guys.

NARRATOR: And it was completely anonymous. For the more in-the-know there were other, more private restrooms, and in those tearooms [gay slang for sexually “cruisy” public restrooms], there’d often be more leisurely [f—king] and sucking going on.

MAN #2 [?]: “Everyone wanted to be with the Wall Street men, because they had so much money. That’s why one of the biggest cruising areas was the 12the floor of the World Trade Center. Back then, you didn’t have to sign in, so it was quite easy to go into the World Trade Center.”

MAN # 2 continues: “The best way to do it would be just in a suit. I walked into the elevator, went up to the 12th floor. I walked into the restroom. And there was, like, six, 12 guys, all getting blowjobs [oral sex]. There were a couple guys getting [f–ked] [sodomized] and all the time, everybody was in suits, which made it even hotter. There were three occasions I did that, and all three occasions, I walked in and it was just, like, it was that way. It was wild.”

NARRATOR: The best place by far, though, was the underground stairway and stairwells [of the World Trade Center] leading up from the underground parking lot.

MAN #3: “I went after the work hours and I found the men’s room, and there was this [f—king] gorgeous young black man. And then he turned around and smiled at me a bit. He goes to some stairwells nearby in the parking garage. ‘Follow me’ [he said].”

NARRATOR: The thing about that stairwell that made it so popular was that the cops never patrolled it, and you could hear someone coming from several floors above or below. Basically, nobody took these stairs except horndogs who used it as a secluded sex spot.

MAN #3 CONTINUES WITH STAIRWELL STORY: “I went up to him and he went up a couple of stairs higher and unzipped his pants, and I started sucking him. He grabbed my hand and pulled me a few stairs up so that my [penis] was now at his mouth level. We kind of continued that rhythm to make it easier, given the geometry of sucking cock in a stairwell.”

NARRATOR: People who were doing dirty things, no matter what it was, if it was drugs or sex or whatever, found those kinds of places. I’ve talked to at least one guy who was there in one of those tea rooms when the planes hit those buildings. My mind visualized that happening, and it’s impossible that all those other people could have gotten out.

MAN #1 (?): “I was there when they started closing down places.”

MAN #3 (?): “In the ’90s, at the height of the HIV crisis, [then-New York City Mayor Rudy] Giuliani’s crackdown on public [sex] cruising was intense, and after he was elected, he systematically raided and shut down lots of gay bars that had back rooms [darkened areas in bars and clubs where homosexual men would engage in anonymous, orgiastic sex], shut down much of the cruising in dirty movie theaters. And he shut down a number of the [gay] bath houses [saunas infamous for homosexual anonymous sex and multiple-partner orgies]. So I’m sure 9/11 totally killed anything happening anywhere in the city.”

NARRATOR: The World Trade Center was…both the literal and also metaphorical end to all of that stuff. Things that had previously been under the radar that everybody knew about, they just didn’t talk about, came out to the forefront, because the powers-that-be all the sudden acknowledged everything. Within weeks of that event, the whole world started changing very rapidly. The escalators in one case are still in the same place that they were before, but it’s so totally different. It was also dangerous, which it really isn’t now.

MAN #3: “I did venture back to these bathrooms a few times, but the stairwell was definitely one of the most memorable experiences there. I never saw him again [guy he fellated in stairwell]. If I recollect, when he finished, I said, ‘Well, wait, wait, wait, can I get your number?’ And he said, ‘No, you can find me here.’ [chuckles] He ran up the stairs to the street.”

END