This about-face was almost completely engineered by gay men. The Beat generation's leading figures were gay, and the leading figures in the Warhol world were gay. Lou Reed was gay. Halston was gay. The attitude toward gay men in the heterosexual community went through a 180-degree turn. In 1973, I could not invite a gay man to dinner with heterosexual friends without them being embarrassed into making fun of him. By 1975, I couldn't have a dinner without my gay friends; they had become so popular.

As far as heterosexual men were concerned, Norman Mailer was everywhere in the '70s, debating against the women's liberation movement and writing about graffiti art, Vietnam, Marilyn Monroe and crime. John Lennon pointed the way for men who were trying to live on an equal footing with women in "Woman is the Nigger of the World" and made it the subject of many interviews.

But the strongest hetero statements and images, albeit not often in favor of the women's movement, came from punk rock, the most sexual art movement of the '70s. The way I—and a number of my friends—saw it, sexually the '70s was the healthiest of times. We were getting rid of many blocks and taboos. We were meeting girls who were as strong as we were. In fact, many of them took more risks than their boyfriends, often leading the way. As the singer Deerfrance put it, " If you had one room with no heat, you would not be alone at night. The juices were flowing, and it made the bands and everyone want to go out and meet each other. It was real life."

The '70s was the first decade in which American men were encouraged to have emotions. "Trust your feelings, Luke," says Obi-Wan Kenobi at the peak of Star Wars (1977). There was also a desire for collaboration on all fronts, as witnessed by the proliferation of group psychology movements and cults. People wanted to be told what to do; they desperately needed leaders. From where I sat, the culture heroes around whom people gathered in New York were the best because, rather than constantly answering people's questions with a lot of mumbo jumbo, they focused on pointing the way to asking the right questions. When they did give advice, it was carefully thought out, such as: "People need to be aware of having to learn how to live," Andy Warhol said. "Because life happens so fast, and sometimes it goes away too quickly."

There were two climaxes in the '70s: 1975 and 1978. The first one came in 1975, the year America finally withdrew all its forces from Vietnam. Several major figures had landmark successes in April of that year, when the Beat Generation made a significant comeback at a Columbia University group reading by Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs. From 1975 onward, Burroughs and Ginsberg grew steadily more famous among the young, as they constantly toured colleges and clubs, reading their works and giving interviews to the underground and local press.

In July and August, the Rolling Stones toured the United States, capturing the imaginations primarily of young men who copied the way they walked, spoke and looked—utterly stoned. Keith Richards was arrested in Arkansas but eluded a court appearance due to the influence of ex-FBI agents working as his personal security. This above-the-law status the Stones flaunted was very much a part of the times. It allowed all of us to feel beyond the old controls, despite reality.

In the spring, Bob Dylan returned to the streets of Greenwich Village, which he had haunted ten years earlier as a folk singer. He gathered together performers from the Beat Generation and the folk rock, glam rock and punk rock generations and wove them into the Rolling Thunder Review, which became the most inventive and inspirational rock tours of the decade. Rolling Thunder reached its first climax in December at Madison Square Garden in New York. The concert was a benefit for the wrongfully jailed boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, the subject of Dylan's hot new single, "Hurricane." Muhammad Ali made an appearance, phoning Carter in prison from the stage. For a moment, the counterculture felt united and proud again.

In September, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol was published. It was well received and widely reviewed, with The New York Times calling Warhol "the bellwether of America." Although it sold poorly at the time, it has stayed in print for the last 25 years.

I would argue that it is a key text of the decade. Read today, it captures the tone and attitude that made Warhol so attractive to young people across the country in the '70s. Serious in intent, it delivers its points on love, sex, money, friendship, work, success and death with humor. Besides, who else could have published a book called "The Philosophy Of" before his name? Around the time of its publication, Warhol managed to infiltrate the Ford White House and turn his visit into an extraordinarily successful international publicity campaign for the book. And with the success of this work, Warhol began to reach a level of intensity and influence in the mainstream that he had never before known.

The most successful TV comedy show of the decade, Saturday Night Live!, commenced its long, highly successful run from New York City. In the ominous times of the Ford administration, the show built a bridge between "underground" and mainstream humor. Two of its stars, John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, opened a bar in downtown Manhattan where they celebrated every Saturday night. The show, and particularly Belushi, became a rallying point. SNL flourished in the New York Underground, where it became the seminal show for a second generation of TV viewers.

From July 16-August 3, 1975, CBGB mounted a rock festival in which more than 40 bands performed. This summer festival was a turning point in the history of New York Underground rock. Not only was it the first rock festival to cater to unrecorded punk bands, it also inspired new bands, attracted wider audiences and subsequently the national press. Punk was getting into a position to become a force in the second half of the decade.

Watergate had given the counterculture an enormous shot in the arm that—along with Ali's surprise 1974 victory over George Foreman and his even greater defeat of Joe Frazier in the 1975 Thrilla in Manilla, combined with the above works and events—created the illusion that "we" could win, that something was happening here that only we understood. In short, there still was a counterculture, something that had definitely been in doubt in the painful days of the early '70s. This feeling was strengthened in the Underground by the assault of punk rock, which began in earnest that November when Patti Smith released her first breakout album, Horses. The New York Times Sunday Magazine's December profile of her was the first sign, as far as the public was concerned, that a new Beat generation, named Punk, was upon us. Blondie closed out the year, playing a New Year's Eve concert in Central Park that made the midnight news.

Suddenly a new social network that cross-pollinated the art, beat, punk, Warhol factory and New York School poetry worlds was transforming New York from a broken-down city full of potholes into a gay, sparkling city full of exhilarating people and astonishing new places, out of which a new way of being would grow.

This was a heady period. For the first time, gay choices were considered the wave of the future. They were on the cutting edge. At the same time, everybody in that world knew they were careening toward an abyss, which made it even more exciting in and of itself. According to one writer, "There was a mystic wildness about the partying, the music, the drugs, the clothes, the free sexuality—the interchange of partners, the constant fucking of boys, girls—it was so shocking and exhilarating." Homosexuality had been an unspeakable vice in the '60s. In the '70s, their assertion of the right to lead an entirely new way of life brought the gay rights movement to a level with the civil rights and women's movements in the minds of liberal Americans.

When Punk magazine's premiere issue hit the stands in January 1976 with Lou Reed on its cover, one sensed that something else unique was shaking itself into existence. There were several useful publications of the period (N.Y. Rocker, The Soho Weekly News), but Punk was the most creative and intelligent. It made the scene by treating the musicians, who were unknown outside the Lower East Side, like stars, but with an irreverent sense of humor. It also defined the punk community in embracing not only Reed, but also mentors from an even earlier generation such as Warhol and Burroughs, something unique to the era.

As I see it, in the 1975-80 pocket of light, we experienced a three-generational artistic collaboration that has never been, and probably never will be, equaled. Ali and Burroughs were as important to Patti Smith as her colleagues in the punk band Television were. To Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol and Lou Reed were as relevant as her friends in the Ramones. For the first time, the new generation did not have to kill its fathers. We just promoted them to Godfathers! And the Godfathers recognized their children and welcomed the fresh energy they brought with them.

In 1976, the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Dead Boys and Blondie all made their first albums and began attracting international attention. Although punk continued the tradition of the boys club, it was also open to gay people. There were a number of strong creative women in the punk scene, including Debbie Harry and Patti Smith. As managers of groups, record executives, fashion designers, poets, playwrights, actresses, magazine editors, film directors, photographers like Marcia Resnick, performance artists like Laurie Anderson, writers like Susan Sontag and underground painters like Susan Williams and Sarah Charlesworth, they all made an impact. The groundbreaking punk girls such as Anya Phillips, Marcia Resnick and Tina l'Hotsky, who were important muse figures at the clubs and among the many bands, also had a beneficial influence.

Sex was exceptionally free of consequences in the '70s. Pornography became much more widespread in magazines, and this was the first time sexually-explicit films could be shown, such as Deep Throat (1973), Behind the Green Door (1973) and The Devil and Miss Jones (1974). Their stars, Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace, became household names. Not only was this a time before AIDS, but in Manhattan the nuclear family was set aside in exchange for sex and success. Children did not feature (except in horror films like The Exorcist (1974) and The Omen (1975) and Andy Warhol's Bad (1977), in which a baby was tossed out the window of a high-rise apartment building).

The disco scene reached its zenith with the opening of Studio 54 in April 1977. Studio 54 revolutionized the concept of the club by introducing the velvet rope across its door. Nobody could enter unless chosen by the doorman. Although 54 was associated prominently with disco, ironically in the end it did more to kill rather than support it by taking what was essentially a lower-class urban music and turning it into a "limited to only the best people" style.

At first, however, the competition between punk and disco created a healthy tension that gave both scenes shape and definition. It was a time in which the demarcation between the street philosophy of the Beats and the chic philosophy of the Warhol Factory met. Warhol's paintings that year would have been perfect covers for Burroughs' books. It was the first time that Warhol, who had been betrayed by Reed in 1966, finally praised Reed's work in public and Reed spoke openly of his debt to Warhol.

Burroughs interviewed Patti Smith for High Times. Warhol painted Debbie Harry's portrait. It was a moment in which the forces linked. It was the climax in which the underground surfaced and the mainstream applauded. In the mid- to late '70s, the rest of the country took several big steps toward catching up with New York. This was due in part to the relentless traveling and proselytizing of our subjects.

Although disco was always far more popular than punk on the radio, in clubs and record sales, the punk bands built a national constituency by touring constantly, bringing their style to impressionable teenagers and young adults across the land. Ginsberg and Burroughs gave readings throughout the country, mostly at universities and punk rock clubs. Andy Warhol traveled as relentlessly as any rock star, publicizing his work. In the spring of 1976, the opening of his Hammer and Sickle paintings was mobbed by ecstatic punks. And what could have been more punk than the Piss paintings and the Sex Parts series he started turning out in 1977. His film Bad, about a gang of girl punks who will do anything, including murder, for hire, was something of a financial disaster, but today it is a cult classic.

The fact that 1976 was the USA's Bicentennial and 1977 saw the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in the UK made this the perfect time for twin attacks on authority and tradition. The artistic relationship between London and New York had always been strong, starting with the British Invasion of 1964-69, but during punk it became more of a two-way street. The success of Blondie and the Ramones in London was equaled by the impact of the Clash and the Sex Pistols in New York, even though the Pistols were temporarily unable to get USA visas. On hearing their savage rendition of "God Save the Queen," William Burroughs wrote them a letter of support.

The Rolling Stones, who had sunk into a torpor from which session musicians could not rescue them during the 1973-76 seasons, snapped back into focus with Some Girls, their best album since Exile on Main Street, as Keith Richards finally kicked heroin in the teeth. Some Girls was a series of love songs recorded in Paris and presented to America via Saturday Night Live.

Lou Reed, who had stepped back from the front lines in '76 and '77, returned to the front in top form with Street Hassle, in which he once again relied upon a Warhol superstar for his shoreline (Eric Emerson, who had appeared in a number of Warhol's films). Reed also came out with the magnificent double live album Take No Prisoners, in which he emerged as the Lenny Bruce of rock 'n' roll with his monologues and asides to the audience. He had finally become himself; he had finally learned how to live.

Warhol himself exploded onto the canvas with a series of beautiful, if sometimes brutal, works in the Skull and awesome Shadows series. Blondie released Parallel Lines, which contained their first American #1 single "Heart of Glass," cracking the carapace of punk to appear as a disco band. Studio 54 became the most important club in the world, mesmerizing and astonishing roomfuls of people. A giant neon Man in the Moon loomed over the dance floor, lifting his glittering coke spoon to his nose. Beneath his benevolent gaze, the most beautiful girls and boys in the world danced with abandon. Hedonistic, elitist, often racist, it was the most decadent place in the world. Andy Warhol dropped by every night, often just standing like a slab of stone-silent oracle, the essence of emptiness. Celebrities appeared like shimmering apparitions. But then Studio 54 was raided by the police, its owners were arrested and thrown in jail and everyone went downtown to the Mudd Club.

The Mudd Club, which opened in October 1978, was the polar opposite of Studio 54. Representing punk, it consisted of two bare rectangular rooms and two very active bathrooms, in which the gender line had finally been completely erased. It shared with Studio 54 a sense of spectacle, putting on events such as the Dead Rock Stars party, which consisted of a series of shrines to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Jim Morrison. We were very aware of our dead that year.

The Mudd instantly became the greatest club in the world, branching out into the nightclub as a performance space and having art exhibitions and literary readings, as well as rock 'n' roll shows. Mickey Ruskin, whose Max's Kansas City had been the gathering place of the downtown crowd from 1966 to 1973, opened two additional bars and restaurants, The Ocean Club, 1976-77 and Chinese Chance, 1978-83. Both became key meeting places for the downtown rock art fashion avant-garde scene.

William Burroughs now inherited the throne of this new society as King of the Underground. His new book about collaboration, The Third Mind (1978, with Brion Gysin), was another key text of the decade. The Nova Convention at the Entermedia Theatre on the Lower East Side that December was a celebration of his life and work by beat, punk, pop, art and rock figures. (Jean-Michel Basquiat, hardly known outside the graffiti art world, was in the audience, and another young unknown painter, Keith Haring, wrote in his journal of the complete awakening the Nova Convention brought him.)

"One has the feeling of being in the middle of something here," Burroughs wrote Paul Bowles in Tangier. He was at the center of the climax of the most creative cultural period in the history of New York. Never before had so many different artists and their audiences been connected by a landscape. Furthermore, the highly successful movies of Woody Allen (Annie Hall and Manhattan) and Martin Scorsese (Mean Streets and Taxi Driver) and other films like Saturday Night Fever and Dog Day Afternoon painted the city in beautiful, if sometimes violent, imagery.

Television went through many revolutions in the '70s, mirroring the social changes, particularly in women's roles. Two of the best programs, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman (starring Allen's first wife, Louise Lasser), about a housewife whose obsessions are the waxy yellow buildup on her kitchen floor and her husband's impotence and Saturday Night Live (on which Burroughs read to an audience of 100,000,000 in 1981), were proud of being from New York. The shows and their actors became as much a part of the fabric as the artists, writers and musicians.

By the end of 1978, the mass consumption of these films and TV shows, the popularity of the new music and the national press stories about the activities in the clubs had familiarized the rest of the country with present-day New York, creating a two-way street of communication that made people like Ali, Burroughs and Warhol, who had previously been impossibly distanced by their heavy metal images, less frightening, even intriguing.

It did not hurt, of course, that both Warhol and Ali infiltrated the White House several times during the '70s, that Burroughs was accepted into the Academy of Arts and Letters before he left New York or that Allen Ginsberg won the Gold Medal in Literature from the National Arts Club in 1979. Also to coincide with the publication of his book of photographs of the '70s, Exposures (1979), and the simultaneous opening of his Portraits of the Seventies at the Whitney Museum in New York, a major TV station profiled Andy Warhol on the popular 20/20 show, which had an audience of 80 million.

As the lifestyles of the New York Underground figures rose from the surface of their work to become accepted by a significant part of the mainstream, New York—which had seemed like a forbidden city in the first two-thirds of the decade—ended it by becoming more a part of the tapestry of America than before.

Heroin: The Sucker Punch, 1979-83
In 1979, a terrific new creative energy exploded all over New York in the form of graffiti art on the walls and subways and in break-dancing, hip-hop and rap music in the streets. This was also the year when the initially all-white MTV was launched. The predominantly black artists in graffiti and rap were so numerous, so talented and so confident and young that, regardless how many were shot by the police, some got through.

The top three graffiti men were the extraordinary Jean-Michel Basquiat, known as the Radiant Child, and the two white boys, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. In 1980-81, Glenn O'Brien shot a movie, Downtown 81, about Basquiat and the downtown music scene starring James Chance and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. This new energy took the style of the late '70s into the early '80s. Everything was moving so fast that whole movements began and ended in a year.

By late 1981, Basquiat had a one-man show in a Soho gallery, and his work on canvas was called Neo-Expressionist. His next move would be collaboration with Andy Warhol. Haring also got a lot of publicity, and they both became stars and started to make a lot of money.

The New York/No Wave bands Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, Lydia Lunch, the Contortions and James White and the Blacks were like graffiti musicians. S&M became the latest sexual fashion. The world of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories continued to find a home in this setting. Lou Reed's mojo was still working. Blondie reached number one repeatedly from 1979 to '81, particularly with the reggae crossover "The Tide is High" and the rap crossover, "Rapture." In 1979, Warhol painted Blondie lead-singer Debbie Harry's portrait in one of the perfect pop marriages of artist subject and form.

However, in the spring of 1979, a dark and horribly destructive element entered the picture. As a result of the Mafia losing control of its distribution after the French Connection bust in 1971 and the Ayatollah Khomeini kicking the CIA-backed Shah out of Iran, the Persian heroin trade the Shah had been sitting on was opened up. A tsunami of strong heroin hit downtown New York, bringing the decade to a tragic end in a chemical blizzard.

Heroin had never been sold in a white neighborhood to white middle-class people before; you would have had to go up to Harlem to purchase it. Now, heroin supermarkets proliferated on the Lower East Side. Ironically, one of the most famous was right across the street from where William Burroughs lived in his famous "Bunker" at 222 Bowery. For a while, its hottest bag was Dr. Nova, named after Burroughs' novel Nova Express. No group seemed immune to its influence. It permeated the rock world, the art world and the literary world with a devastating effect upon this very special time and its cast of characters.

For me, the shock troops of the '70s were heroes because of the risks they took. They carried the brunt of the revolution to the streets via their work and entertained very real danger, as the casualty reports testify. In 1979, William Burroughs, Patti Smith, half of Blondie, Dede Ramone and Jean-Michel Basquiat, among many others at all levels of the counterculture, became junkies. After stabbing Nancy Spungen to death in the Chelsea Hotel, Sid Vicious, the bass player in the Sex Pistols, became the poster child of the junkies. In October 1979, he overdosed and died. This gave the media the opportunity to cut punk rock down to a stupid movement propagated by madmen and killers.

New York had always been looked upon by the rest of America as a mad, bad, dangerous place to live; here was further confirmation. In late 1978, the publisher and editor-in-chief of High Times, Tom Forcade, committed suicide. In 1979, the drug smuggler who starred in a movie Forcade had been producing, Cocaine Cowboys, also killed himself. The casualty reports would increase year by year.

Another exodus now began. In February 1980, Lou Reed got married, turned his back on the scene, went into Alcoholics Anonymous and bought a house in the country.  In March, Patti Smith broke up her band, got married and moved to Detroit. In October, Muhammad Ali, who had fought valiantly but at great cost throughout 1976-78, shuffled off-stage after a dismal loss in 1980 to deal with what would soon become severe physical problems.

But nothing sounded the death knell of the decade as much as the murder of John Lennon outside his apartment building, the Dakota, in December 1980. It was the negation of just about everything that we could hold onto in the counterculture; it deflated an entire culture. In 1981, by which time people were dropping like flies, John Belushi, the most popular star of Saturday Night Live, which had been a strong proponent of the '70s lifestyle, had died of a heroin overdose.

In February 1981, the first novel in Burroughs' new trilogy, Cities of the Red Night, was published to international acclaim. Burroughs, now on the methadone program, left the Bunker in 1981 and moved to Kansas, where he would spend the rest of his life. Two months later, Allen Ginsberg, who had lived on the Lower East Side since the 1940s, also left New York, relocating in Boulder, Colorado.