This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
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 HERE] 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 Sept. 11, 2001.
As first reported by this reporter and Americans For Truth last November, 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 – its subjects fondly remembering gay “cruising” sites at the twin towers where men would meet furtively to engage in deviant sex acts with other men.
“Trade Center” creator Baran writes: “Our five subjects describe their memories of meaningful public sex encounters in each [orgy] location.” The film’s narrator even speculates that men who were “cruising” for anonymous sex in the buildings perished when the towers were hit by airplanes hijacked by Islamic terrorists.
The contents and crude sexual slang of “Trade Center” are too graphic to report in a family newspaper. See the original story and film transcript for more details.
The taxpayer-funded “Trade Center” was released on the pro-LGBT video-hosting site Vimeo on Sept. 7, 2021, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the al-Qaida 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 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 ("pride") and political "rights" aspects of the LGBT movement. Historically, high-risk, anonymous sex has been downplayed by gay activists and the media seeking to mainstream out-and-proud homosexuality.
Nevertheless, gay male promiscuity is linked to rampant STDs and health maladies among “men who have sex with men,” or MSM, the official CDC classification. 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 LGBT pride festivals.
The pro-pornography Baran reportedly views “Trade Center” as an important historical work covering a segment of “gay” life. What he calls “meaningful public sex” is part of the Sexual 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” and LGBT film groups as well as video streaming company Vimeo, which bans Christian ministry 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.
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.”
By timing his release of “Trade Center” around a 9/11 anniversary, the "sex-positive" leftist Baran was effectively arguing that illicit, anonymous, and deviant sexual encounters that occurred on WTC grounds somehow deserve memorializing alongside traditional 9/11 tributes, like this one posted on X Monday by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani:
As can be seen from the film's transcript, “Trade Center’s” narrator criticizes the post-9/11 environment in New York City in which then-Mayor Giuliani cracked down on the city’s sleazy sex businesses, such as strip clubs and gay bars with orgy-enabling “dark rooms,” to reduce crime and improve the living quality of the city’s residents.
Baran's deviance-glorifying films get a mainstream promotion
Baran is a living example of how left-wing filmmakers, no matter how far they reside outside the cultural mainstream, have no problem gaining the biggest platforms for their work. The raunchy and edgy subject matter, even aberrant sexual topics involving minors, is no hindrance in today's “woke” entertainment industry that champions all things LGBT.
For example, Baran produced a Netflix documentary, “Circus of Books” (2020), which sympathetically and non-judgmentally tells the story of a “religious” Jewish couple who owned a homosexual bookstore near Los Angeles. The now-shuttered bookstore also produced hardcore gay porn films for sale. In the film, the couple’s son comes out as gay, causing his mother angst but eventually leading her to become an LGBT advocate. No connection is made between the son’s newly declared 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 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 same Vimeo that provided a platform for “Trade Center” has a well-documented history of deplatforming Christian groups and those opposing the LGBT activist agenda, as Christian columnist Michael Brown described in 2017 after Vimeo took down all the videos of a Christian ministry, Pure Passion, that featured the testimonies of men and women who have overcome sinful LGBT lifestyles through a relationship with Jesus Christ.
