In the dawn-tinted Parthenon of awful gay movies, Cruising stands alone. It doesn’t merely backfire; it backfires brilliantly.
So it is with mixed emotions (two parts joy, three parts delirium) that we turn our gaze on September 18 when this anti-classic will be released finally on DVD in its shameless uncut glory (with restored scenes never released) — and even better in hi-def, so you can catch all the undulating male bodies in the background of its bar scenes where, according to the movie’s fantastical conceit, everyone is always in some state of fuck or suck.
Cruising was certainly a shocker in its day. The 1980 thriller is set in the night-world of New York’s orgiastic backrooms, peepshows and open-air fuck-fests that ran 24/7 in the bushes of Central Park. A then hot and nasty Al Pacino goes undercover to attract a serial killer, decoying himself as a hungry bottom in wife-beaters and low-slung jeans. The killer, meanwhile, a lanky, long-torsoed lad whose face is always concealed, is shown tricking and then killing his bound-up S&M partners — a sort of buyer’s remorse we usually associate with the black widow spider — ever whispering in his victim’s ear the moronic catchphrase “You made me do that.”
This, as it turns out — spoiler up ahead, kids, but one that still brings tears to my eyes — is a cry for help. You see our disturbingly hot psycho-homo is trying, in his sad, stunted way, to send a message to his Dad. One would have thought that a quickly dashed off postcard — Hi, Dad. I’m gay, living in New York, and go fuck yourself — would have done the trick, but no. What’s called for is murder — bloody, steel-glinty, labor intensive murder — leaving behind a terrible mess for the staff of the various no-tell/motels to clean up.
Still, one would have to have a heart of granite not to giggle at the final scene when the killer is caught with unsent letters stuffed in his jeans, not so much at the dizziness of the character, but at that of the screenwriter who thought this sort of Freudian gewgaw explained anything or was even mildly credible as a motivation to kill one fuckable — the supporting players were obviously hired for their Roman-boy curly hair and bubble butts — extra after another.
A magnet for gay outrage when it debuted, the film was greeted by protests that tried to block its very filming in the West Village — leaders, haranguing the actors with bullhorns, claimed they had somehow gotten hold of the shooting script and that the film equated homosexuals with murderers, a willful misreading and a bit of guerrilla warfare that stoked the troops for the street theater that was to blaze in earnest a few years later with the advent of AIDS and ACT UP.
Thus, the film was released to the shocked propriety of movie-critics, recut to appease both the Family Focusers and the gay politicos, then re-released in a cut-up, de-balled version. Not surprisingly the film faded fast at the box-office (total gross $19 million, vs the $209 million of 1980’s top earner, The Empire Strikes Back), joined that rogues gallery so dear to Nightcharm’s heart known as “Worst Film of the Year,” and brought to earth the rising arc of its director William Friedkin, flying high on the receipts of his box-office phenom, The Exorcist.
Al Pacino, meanwhile, has never since acknowledged the film. As far as he’s concerned he never made it. It is simply — and I think this is how we should speak of it among ourselves — his “lost” film.
And yet.
I think what was really bugging the politically correct windbags was not what was fictional but what was accurate about the movie. The New York backroom scene of the post-Stonewall years was, by any standard, as wild as the cocksucker-happy West of the much-missed HBO series Deadwood — even if alas, real life, as always, is never quite as Over the Rainbow as the filmed version of it.
The self-appointed guardians of gay morality railed against the “negative stereotypes” in the film. But sex was always a hard one for the politicos, who preferred to get on high horses and gas about homophobia and discrimination — easy, obvious targets. To embrace the physicality of homosexuality — the sucking and fucking that set you apart and made you such a mocked and reviled public figure — that is often the last liberation, the final shedding of a much-decried gay self-loathing.
And a movie that described that physical world, and did it for the sheer titillation of the straights, made the guardians jittery. Too much was exposed in a dumb film that had stumbled on the truth. The rampant sex of the period — always problematic for the gay spin doctors and professional pearl-clutchers — the unapologetic free-for-all of gay men who no longer wanted to pass, but chose, in a common slogan of the times, to “have it all.” All the sex, all the time, all brought to a screeching halt when the genie escaped the bottle, the inevitable virus that had no cure.
And so this film, for all its hyper-homo sensationalism, managed to catch the zeitgeist anyway and ride that train, without looking terribly out of place, to its next, unhappy stop.
Cruising, no one will ever deny, was calculated to exploit sex — raw gay sex — as yet another, and more radical, turn of the screw for a public already firmly torqued by Deep Throat, as well as the 1001 orgasms of Donna Summer. (Who can ever forget the first time one heard that coital moan intoning “Cum…Cum…Cum into my life” as the stately chords of a Chopin prelude climbed blamelessly and heroically above the luded-out buzz of a disco, high up where the stallion meets the sun? It was a moment to be matched only much later, when the same Donna Summer announced from a stage, apropos of nothing, that she hated the sin of homosexuality but loved all us homo sinners and record-buyers — she who had done nothing with her life but churn out pussy music.)
However, no fair-minded viewer would ever conclude that in its rush to cash in on the polymorphous perverse, Cruising equated gays with psychos, even if just that sort of tacit assertion had often been put forth by many milder movies in the past, was in fact a commonplace of cinematic shorthand. (Such Hitchcock classics as Rebecca, Strangers on a Train and Rope come quickly — much too quickly — to mind. More recently, I was staggered to see the reemergence of the killer dyke — like meeting an old friend, there was something nostalgic about it — in Judi Dench’s turtle-eyed malevolence in Notes on a Scandal, played against Cate Blanchett’s final explosive rebuke, a bravura duet for two actresses.)
In fact, exploitation aside, Cruising was not meant to denigrate anyone. It came from the same William Friedkin who directed the equally (and as unjustly) maligned Boys in the Band, a groundbreaking depiction of gay men as they were, not as they should be, that had, despite its self-consciously “tormented” centerpiece, a witty, bohemian zing to its repartee and infectiously liberating characters like the unapologetically nelly Emory, the magnificently self-possessed Harold, the beautiful, openly sexual Bob La Tourneaux — the actor himself an actual male escort — as the cowboy hustler.
Moreover, Cruising, no doubt in response to the bullhorn protests at its creation, even had a corny disclaimer tacked on to the film’s opening credits: “The film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world which is not meant to be representative of the whole.” Never had a movie tried so hard to make nice with angry men and women who were ready to unload a lifetime’s worth of rage upon it.
For those of us who loved the film from the start, in all its balls-out goofiness. Cruising is a rip-roaring E-ride in a Disneyland of gay-o-la kink, a funhouse delight that is — not so bad, it’s good, as its handful of gay fans sometimes contend — but so preposterously good, it’s evil. Everything in it is mirrored backwards.
The leather bars in it are the dream leather bars you always wanted to go to. The park trysts are haloed by backlighting and the pairings are movie-actor idyllic. There are even two glamorous Swedish-blond drag queens that go in and out of the bars in chaps and motorcycle caps, looking like vanilla ice-cream Chers – as if such a thing would ever have occurred at the time. (I remember watching a clean-cut college boy being tossed down the stairs at the Mineshaft because he showed up in a crew sweater and the faintest remnant of cologne! Nobody has ever been a better fascist than a prissy bouncer with something to prove.)
Those or us who saw Cruising in its premiere run, when like a virgin it was untouched for the very first time, all have our favorite moments. Mine occurs when decoy and killer finally meet, eyeing each other in a dangerously secluded corner of Central Park, under a bridge, if memory serves. Pacino is sitting on a park bench, legs provocatively parted, eyeing his man with all the servility of the extremely horned-up bottom. One of the joys of the film is the plastic dialog. The killer, being lean and lanky, is therefore also laconic. And how does he break the ice? With three terse, never-to-be forgotten words: “Hips or lips?”
Who could not but fall instantly in love with that?
David K. tells me his favorite moment follows immediately. Pacino stands. Decoy and killer weave back and forth like two fighting cocks, sizing each other up, stripping off their clothes with an air of hostile sexual challenge. “How big are you?” says psycho. “Party size” is Pacino’s brain-etching reply.
In fact, the web is brimming with dedications and re-evaluations of this movie that no self-respecting gay man was suppose to abide. Some of my favorites:
Mark Adnum of Outrate wonders what the fuss was about. Though he finds little to love in the film, he does allow that “if it hadn’t been set upon when it was released [by gay activists], it might have become a quiet cult film due to its oddness, and its interrogation scene involving a seven-foot tall black bodybuilder in a g-string.”
Yes, we all loved the black man in the g-string, who the cops bring out to work-over a suspect, making one wonder what the hell was a man in a g-string doing in a police station and did they keep him in the basement, like the gimp in Pulp Fiction, for “special occasions” — like when they wanted to terrify supposedly “hardened” S’s and M’ss?
James Hollis Smith from Pop Culture Punks and Cult Hero Screwheads offers an alternative theory:
Speaking of jockstraps, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Big John Slade (who the hell knows his real name), the six-foot-something black man clad in nothing more than a jockstrap and Mounties hat who enters the police interrogation scene with the express purpose of dumbfounding both suspects and audience members alike. He is responsible for many laughs himself, but believe me, they’re intended jocular respites. Friedkin knew we’d need something to get us over the sight of Pacino hog-tied naked on a hotel bed.
Drew Fitzpatrick writes in his meticulously researched Cruising: Re-examining the Reviled:
The word was out on Cruising long before it hit the streets — an ugly, violent, homophobic mess of a movie, designed to appeal to only the most base, prurient interests. You can’t help but wonder what they would have said if they had seen the film before it was re-cut to secure an ‘R’ rating. After an “off the record” screening of Friedkin’s version, ratings board chairman Richard Heffner remarked that “there aren’t enough X’s in the English language for that movie!”
Gary Morris indites the gay activists for missing the point in his Bright Lights Film Journal review:
Friedkin’s sweaty tableaux of leather-clad, popper-snorting, fist-fucking, sadomasochistic hedonists was bound to trigger a reaction from gays who feared society would assume all homosexuals were busily engaged in these activities. (This sounds dangerously similar to the middle-class queens who complain about the presence of leather, drag, or nudity in gay marches.)
What they failed to note is how Cruising points the finger for a violent, decadent society far past the gyrating leather queens, who come off more as fun-loving party-boys than sinister sexual psychopaths. Before we meet Pacino, we see another pair of cops viciously harassing two gay street prostitutes to the point of orally raping them. The policemen’s dialogue shows a sweeping nihilism on the part of the police that the film continually reinforces. “They’re all scumbags,” one of them says. “Who?” “All of them.”
And finally Scott of Cinema de Merde:
So Al Pacino … is a young cop who is asked by his commander Paul Sorvino to pose as a gay man in the leather scene and try to draw out the killer. Paul actually asks him, rather out of the blue: “You ever been porked? Or have a man smoke your pole?” He then describes the scene of “Heavy leather. S&M. It’s a world unto itself.” Hey, thanks for the exposition, Paul, and if I ever get my pole smoked, I’ll let you know.
We invite our readers to offer their own fond memories of this “the most insulting gay movie ever made.”
hattip to StinkyLulu for turning us on to the video
I wrote about Cruising not long ago myself here.
I was not even born when this movie went out.
I never saw it.
Should I ?
Thanks, Johann. Now I’m depressed.
“…as well as the 1001 orgasms of Donna Summer. Who can ever forget the first time one heard that coital moan intoning “Cum….Cum….Cum into my life” as the stately chords of a Chopin prelude climbed blamelessly and heroically above the luded-out buzz of a disco, high up where the stallion meets the sun?”
I honestly almost fell out of my chair.
Brilliant.
Why I love this site.
It’s odd. I didn’t catch this film in the theatres. (I wasn’t out back then.) But I remember the outrage (and the backlash from so-called family groups). And once I did catch it (years later on VHS) I was struck at how intense and frightening it was.
It always struck me as a horror film where the debasement of extreme sexual practice was equated with murderous rage.
SPOILER ALERT
At the end, when the neighbor is discovered to have been killed, there is a creepy feeling that maybe Pacino’s character did it. That somehow being in such close proximity to such degredation was supposed to somehow explain how a good cop could not only turn bad but could also kill the only sypathetically drawn character in the film.
The most frightening part for me (and one that actually had more than a grain of truth) was that if someone gay was killed, then nobody in the police department would do anything to try to stop the killer.
Years later, a friend of mine was killed, on his doorstep going out to get his paper, and the police did FUCKING ZILTCH to figure out who or why. They never asked questions. They didn’t interview witnesses. And this was 1996. So the basic disconnect for me was that the police would care that a serial killer was killing faggots.
There was a serial killer of trans hookers in Atlanta back around the same time, and honestly, the cops couldn’t have cared less. Their attitude seemed to be ‘they’re killing the right people, so why bother?’
I wonder, when the re-cut film is available, will you acutally watch it again and tell us what you think? I’m not sure I have it in me to watch such darkness again.
Was it amazing? Was it the first time I ever saw such blatant gay sexuality on screen? Yes. But did it also say, loud and clear, that for men like me there is no safety net? Absolutely.
Pithy dialogue doesn’t excuse the utterly dark heart of the film. I don’t dislike it because it views homosexuals as killers, but because it views homosexual killers so lightly. And that is a truth I don’t need reminded of.
One of my friends, a straight guy, asked me why I am still single. I reminded him that he didn’t have to worry that a woman he asked out might decide to kill him for asking her out. But that it was a real concern for me (outside a gay bar, and in my town gay bars are FULL of easily offended half-naked straight guys).
I think I’ll tie him to a chair and force him (Clockwork Orange style) to watch this movie. Then maybe he’ll get it.
I saw it when it was released. It was gripping, even if I could not say it was always good. One of the points that seems to be missed is that there is only one violent killer in the film, and that the point of the plot is to catch him. Reaction against it was rooted in self-loathing and homophobia, in my opinion. It was over the top, but so was gay culture circa 1979-80.
I saw this a few years ago. I had a somewhat similar take like Stowing. I felt on some level that Pacino’s character had developed an affection for the sweet artist neighbor and possibly killed him in a state of Gay Panic, the idea being that his plunge into the sexual gay netherworld had “corrupted” him. “Blue Velvet” drew initially similar ire for its sadomasochistic heroine, hero, and villain. That movie makes reference to the “disease” of violent sex and “Cruising” might ambiguously suggest that homosexuality is a form of sickness that infects a good, hard-working, family man of a public servant, turning him into a monster.
I didn’t have a necessarily visceral reaction to the film, but it can be argued that in some ways it conflates homosexuality with sadomasochism, violence, danger, murder, etc.– a not uncommon theme during the late 70s, 80s and beyond in “Looking For Mr. Goodbar”, “Windows”, “The Fan”, “Dressed To Kill”, “Deadly Blessing”, “Hide and Go Shriek”, “Heart of Midnight”, “The Hitcher”, “The Silence of The Lambs”, and “Basic Instinct”. If I remember correctly, the dark closing image is of the killer stalking the bar scene after his demise, which made me wonder if Pacino had indeed adopted the murderous persona, meaning the killings would continue. Homosexuality/Murder becomes a communicable virus.
Just as evaluations for “Basic Instinct” with its beautiful, brilliant, and ultimately unpunished Queer Villain have become more complex over the years since its controversial arrival, it’s fitting that the same is happening for “Cruising”, given that the film is being interpreted differently within the gay community itself.
Are you kidding? This is so going next to my DVD’s of “Glitter,” “Showgirls,” and “Valley of The Dolls”! What does concern me is the chance that my entire DVD collection will spontaneously combust when I bring the thing home.
If you freeze and advance during the first knife murder, you can see that Friedkin inserted several frames of hardcore buttfucking for a subliminal effect - basically planting the idea that gay sex=death.
Was he trying to influence the audience? Or show the murderer’s state of mind? Seems like the former to me.
>Al Pacino, meanwhile, has never since acknowledged the film.
I remember the making of the film in the west village when Christopher Street was THE STREET, the center of gay culture/nightlife in NYC. On almost every street corner around the area, “STOP THE MOVIE CRUISING” was stencilled onto the sidewalk. Down at the West Side Highway and Christopher, large crowds of gay men disrupted street shooting of night scenes with bullhorns and slogan shouting. What struck me at the time was the inclusion as extras many of the guys who would regularly cruise the streets, the trucks, the International Stud, etc., and when I saw the film, the first guy tied up and stabbed was a gay porn star I had seen in movies around that time. The film was filled with familiar faces, places, from that time. In a sense it was a very current, finger-on-the-pulse kind of a film, fleshed out with characters, who in real life were participants of the scene which was depicted on film. In my mind, the movie is highly artificial, yet it possesses a realness of that time and place for me.
When I think back on that time, I’m filled with awe at the richness of the subculture that was going on, and what came out of it. I have to wonder if AIDS had not appeared, what direction the culture would have taken from those shaky first steps of open sexual expression, music/club culture, et al. I digress…sigh….
I saw this move when it debuted in 1980. I liked it because it showed a different gay than what we were seeing on TV (Billy Crystal’s Jody on Soap) or in the movies (Killer Drag queens in Freebe and the Bean.) Those new masculine, unashamed images of gay men threatened gay and straight people alike. Those were the days prior to 500 channel 24/7 television exploitation of Paris Hilton’s stinky twat.
I wasn’t introduced to this film until the tender age of 12, when I saw it one late Skinemax evening while my parents were asleep. They showed it many more times, and there’s probably still a carefully edited version of the film lurking on an unmarked VHS tape in my old bedroom closet. I only taped the good parts - and there were many. Of course, it’s always kind of a drag when you have to time your orgasms to occur before one of those sexy, bubble-butted extras gets stabbed or gutted. I imagine the experience of watching this film was like what many pubescent straight boys experienced when watching that shower scene in Kubrick’s “The Shining.”
It seems to me that nightcharm misses much of the point entirely.
First off, attacking “politically correct windbags” 30 years after the fact is boring and easy and anyone who says “politically correct”, especially when looking back in time, is suspect.
What was going on with the protests, it seems to me, was the fear of subculture going public. Some subculture survives purely because it is below the radar of the mainstream, or at least that’s how it feels. Whatever the director’s intentions, this movie was meant to make money for people not connected to the subculture it was based in, at the potential damage to that subculture. That’s called exploitation.
Now, exploitation has unintended consequences sometimes. I agree that “Cruising” (which I haven’t seen for a decade) is a brilliant disaster, shining a light on a scene that wouldn’t be portrayed the same way today. It’s fun. It is even, intentionally or unintentionally, hot at times and certainly became fantasy fodder for many folks.
But it is a crossroads movie, made at a time when Gay Liberation had brought a subculture enough into the public eye that a major movie could be made to exploit it. At times of subcultural crossroads there are always political fights. In retrospect they may be silly-seeming. But think about what was at stake at the time and it’s hard to feel like either side didn’t have bad intentions.
I was too young for the original round of protests to register. But I do remember ten or so years later, Cruising still being referred to as a dreadful slander upon the gay community — and very specifically, that it equated promiscuous cruisers with serial killers.
And then I saw it, and, um, no.
And I think that Nightcharm’s piece does actually nail why that disconnect occurred.
You can see clips of the mysterious black police interrogator on YouTube: (link)
That black guy is hot. I want him to do things to me.
I can’t wait for the DVD to come out now, because this movie looks like it would give me an erotic charge in that same deep, dark, Freudian place that was marked by the stuff I would have caught an illicit peek of at 2:00am on HBO, right at the cusp of puberty.
During the filming of Cruising, I was the media director of the Gay Activists Alliance here in NYC. I remember getting clubbed by a cop under the West Side Highway during one of the demonstrations. I was a follow-the-leader type in those days, and the big honchos in GAA, who had gotten hold of the script thanks to moles in the industry, were all gaga that it was a big insult to the gay community, so I followed along with it. In retrospect, I recall that these same honchos would go straight from a meeting to the trucks or the abandoned piers or to the never-to-be forgotten loft club on 14th Street, The Toilet.
So I guess the message was don’t defame us by telling everyone what we do. The levels of hypocrisy and self-hate in that attitude boggle my current mind.
My special contribution to the campaign against the movie was to call up Gerald Walker, who had written the book on which the movie was based and who was an editor at The New York Times that I’d once worked for, and chew him out. My apologies, Gerald, wherever you are now cruising the Creamy Way in the sky.
I finally saw the movie late one night a few years ago on the tube (the truncated, virtually incoherent version) and thought it was a hoot. I can’t wait to see the director’s cut, so to speak.
For Your Viewing Pleasure:
Al learns the hankie code. (link)
Porn stars-to-be get work as extras (link)
The inevitable Party Mix mash-up (link)
The Ken Doll homage (link)
I saw this movie in bits and pieces when my parents left the room and it was on A&E in the middle of the day! I was extremely freaked out and titillated at the same time.
Later, in college, my roommate and I were taking bong hits and watching Cruising as it was being talked about. The scene where the very large black man in a jock comes out and backhands the guys in the interrogation room? We lost it. We were laughing so hard at how it didn’t make any sense to either of us - we ended up crying and in walks his girlfriend. It only made it more funnier.
Not Another Dead Queer Movie.
When I picked up on the hardcore scenes spliced into the one trick getting knifed in the back it was just too gross. “You made do that” kind of sounds like “you asked for it.” Whatev. Makes me think of the rape scene in Showgirls. There’s sleazy and then there’s just ooh yeah, get off on someone getting worked over or beat up or cut up because they’re whores. ‘Cause that’s what we go for.
Amazing that this article and none of the replies mention one of the biggest (and legit) arguments people had: at the time, there was virtually no other representation of gay life onscreen, certainly not in a film with a big star from a big studio (or should I say “party-sized” star and studio). There weren’t even nice gay sidekicks onscreen in 1980.
The S&M and cruising subcultures were real and perhaps in some ways more extreme than what was shown on film, but not all gay men lived that way. It’s easy to argue now that there’s nothing wrong with showing it, but if there were films even as disappointing as Philadelphia going out to wide audiences at the time, protests may not have been as extreme. The mainstream-soapy Making Love was two years away at that point, and gays were fighting to get any semblance of balance into the popular culture.
As for the film, the main thing I recall being offensive about it was how mediocre it was (like a lot of Friedkin’s work), with a muddled plot and a cheesy freeze-frame ending. Will see the director’s cut if only to see whether the narrative improves along with the added smut - imagine Friedkin would like another chance just to make it better.
That is a very good point. I don’t know if it was so much gay audiences getting miffed that the movie was some kind of supposed searing expose than it was them seeing it as just more of the same old, same old: gay slashers, psychotic queers, urban gay smut, S&M, the contagion of gay desire, and Sex=Death. Had we been anything other than victims, perverts, and muderers in movies for decades prior, we might not have been so sick of it all by the dawn of the 80s.
It didn’t get much of release stateside, but there was an even more violent Italian movie called “The New York Ripper” that hit Europe about the same time and featured a similar plotline wherein women were the victims of a male killer. A razor-wielding wackjob targets hookers, sex show workers, sex addicts, and liberated young woman in the Big Apple. A woman wakes up in her hotel room and realizes the rough trick she’s picked up is the maniac who’s been terrorizing the city. A hooker gets slashed. The police are rancidly corrupt and a hetero relationship bites the dust by the movie’s conclusion.
That movie drew a great deal of fire from Women’s Groups in Europe and was even banned in Britain. It’s interesting how different the two minorities are treated. Violence against women and the lack of decent movie roles are a constant topic, but gays actually have a far worse lot and little support from the public at large. I can’t imagine that a director could’ve gotten away with splicing porn inserts into a scene of woman being murdered without taking some pretty heavy flak for sending a very ugly mixed message.
The movie was totally lame..but I’d see it anyway…some straight guys perception as to how gays act??? Quite funny, especially the scene where Pacino is with a trick and they are hitting on each other outside in a park…I honestly thought they were getting ready to fight…LOL