What Being Gay In New York City Used To Be Like

From New York Magazine, July 1978:

The Ramble [in Central Park] has been in the public eye ever since the assault July 5 by a gang of anti-gay toughs who, at 9:30, just a little after dusk that Wednesday, went wading in with baseball bats, bashing any men they thought were gay. The dull thwack of bats hitting flesh and bone accompanied shouts of "faggot" from the all-white band of defenders of decency. Five men were hospitalized with serious injuries—including Dick Button, a former ice-skating star and now sportscaster...

It was in the Ramble one night last week that I encountered Paul, a man of 56, successful in his Seventh Avenue garment business (he's the owner, not the designer), who occupies a lovely duplex apartment on Central Park West with his wife of twenty years and their two sons. Yet, several times a month, Paul goes out into the dark of night, walks a few blocks from his home to the 81st Street entrance to Central Park. Just a few feet beyond the stone wall that separates park from street, there is a break in the iron fence that seals off the bushes and trees from the roadway into the park. The iron bars have been bent back to allow easy access to a well-worn; narrow dirt path among the bushes. Paul follows that path until he comes to a series of turnings. Choosing one, he enters a grotto within a grotto. There, around a large, gnarled old tree—the "orgy tree"—there are little confessional-like spaces created by the untrimmed flora. There, in the darkness of the night, Paul finds a few moments of release with his own kind. Then he returns to his home, his wife, his children. 

Except one night, about six months ago. That night, Paul left the park and went instead to Bellevue's emergency room to have sixteen stitches taken in his head. "I fell down an embankment," he told his wife.
"They jumped me, three kids," he told me. "Twenty, twenty-five, maybe, not older. I couldn't tell, they jumped me as I was just stepping out on the Bridle Path. I offered money. Just don't hurt me, I said. 'Man, we don't want your money, you faggot,' they said. 'It's probably just as queer as you are.' Then they started kicking me. I passed out for a minute. When I came to, they were prancing arm in arm down the road, singing: 'We killed a faggot, we killed a faggot.' They were laughing."