It's impossible for me to review "The Place Between Our Bodies" without revealing a couple of facts about myself: 1) I'm 60-something, mostly male-oriented bisexual man who came of age a half-decade after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, and 2) I lived in San Francisco from 1982 to 1994 and of all the businesses on San Francisco's Polk Street -- which was the city's primary gay neighborhood before the rise of the Castro District in the late '70s -- only the Le Salon video store survived into the '80s (and is probably defunct now, thanks to the easy accessibility of online erotica today).
It wasn't until 2009 that I discovered "The Place Between Our Bodies" online. I didn't even know the film existed. Watching it, it is a true period piece about thr state of gay male sexuality and relationships in San Francisco in the early to mid '70s.
Indeed, much of what conprised gay culture and community in San Francisco inthe early '70s was still heavily influenced by the Haight-Ashbury hippies, so it came as no surprise to me that long hair was practically de rigeur among gay men at that time (And on a personal note, I wish it still was, as I fell deeply in love with the "flower children" and remain very much a hippie at heart half a century later).
Even for vintage gay erotic films of the '70s, "The Place Between Our Bodies" is a rarity; the only such film -- other than Arthur Bressan's "Passing Strangers," which also came out in 1975 -- that, at least visually, told a genuine love story. The latter part of the film, which shows a male couple making love in their bedroom, is a far cry from nearly all of the gay male pornography made in the last half-century.
It is quite evident from the looks on the couple's faces that they are very much in love with one another and that their lovemaking is with a deep intimacy you just can't find in today's commercial gay porn.
No one knows if, 43 years later, the couple is still together -- or even, in the face of the AIDS crisis that ravaged San Francisco's gay male population in the '80s, if either man is still alive (Both would be in their late 60s by now). But what they shared in front of the camera in 1975 was by far, in my estimation, the most beautifully intimate lovemaking between two men ever filmed.