Scent of a ManAl Pacino hunts a killer in New York City gay bars in Cruising.
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2007, at 5:03 PM ET
The people at Warner Home Video must be giddy. Months ago, they decided to finally release Cruising on DVD and picked a Sept. 18 street date. The movie, directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection), stars Al Pacino as a cop investigating a string of murders in New York City's gay underworld. It touched off impassioned protests from the gay community when it appeared in 1980, and Warner perhaps hoped that memories of the controversy would stoke curiosity in the DVD. But never in their wildest imaginations could they have dreamed that just as the disc was hitting store shelves, the senator from Idaho would make cruising front-page news. Maybe now, thanks to Larry Craig, Cruising will at long last get its due.
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StumbleUponPacino plays Steve Burns, a rookie cop who goes undercover to attract a psychopath who has been butchering gay men in their late 20s. Burns rents an apartment in the Village and ducks into a gritty shop along the crowded Village strip, where he nods at a display of handkerchiefs. "What are these for?" he asks the store clerk. "Light blue hankie in the left back pocket means you want a blow job," the guy answers. "Right pocket means you give one. Green one: Left side says you're a hustler; right side, a buyer. Yellow one: Left side means you give golden showers; right side, you receive … See anything you want?" "I'm gonna go home and think about it," Burns stammers.
Before long, however, Burns perfects the Tom of Finland look and becomes a regular on the scene, cruising Central Park and the Village bars. But as the corpse count keeps rising, Burns is forced to find more suspects and seek out more intimate, and more dangerous, sexual encounters. In one bungled sting, his fellow cops discover him trussed up and nude on a hotel bed.
The last third of the film squanders some of the intensity the first two acts build up, as the final act is given over to a prolonged cat-and-mouse game between Burns and a killer with some serious daddy issues. But the ending is surprising, and haunting. Latent homosexual tendencies, the movie suggests, may lead to homicidal ones.
Activists took offense at that message. The movie appeared barely a decade after the 1969 Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, generally credited with sparking the modern gay rights movement. At the time, television and movies offered few images of gay men, and when they did show up, they often didn't make it to the end credits alive. By the time Cruising was in production, the gay community seems to have had enough. While Friedkin was filming in 1979, Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell predicted that the film would be "the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen." Bell seems to have assumed the film would hew closely to the 1970 book Cruising, a more incendiary tale told partially from a bigoted cop's point of view. (Friedkin abandoned that device.) Bell implored his readers to "give Friedkin and his production a terrible time if you spot them in your neighborhood."
They did just that. As production executive Mark Johnson recounts on the commentary track of the new DVD, protesters sounded whistles and sirens during filming. They perched on rooftops near the set and used reflectors to shine spots of light onto the scenes, ruining the takes. Eventually, thousands marched in the streets of Greenwich Village in protest. (Though, it should be noted, other segments of the gay community also showed up, to protest the protesters.)
When the film finally arrived in theaters, the National Gay Task Force likened it to Birth of a Nation. According to The Lavender Screen, Boze Hadleigh's book about gay film, 20,000 fliers appeared on the New York gay scene, with a warning: "This is not a film about how we live, it's a film about why we should be killed."
Cruising is at times a violent, brutal picture. In the opening scene, ominous synth chords portend the discovery of a severed limb floating in the East River. Moments later, punk rock washes over a crowded bar as an ill-fated hookup transpires against a backdrop of sweating, mustachioed men—a scandalous netherworld Friedkin paints with a dark palette of black leather and Levi's blue. And with its depiction of countercultural, homo hedonism, Cruising was understandably not the first impression a burgeoning gay rights movement wanted to project to mainstream America. Nor did the movie offer a comforting welcome to anyone apprehensive about coming out.
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Remarks from the Fray:
You supplied the answer in your column: context. At the time, there were very few depictions in the mass media of gay people. The few that existed showed them as seedy, desperate, invariably unhappy, and destined for murder or suicide.
"Cruising" showed gay life as unwholesome, entirely focused on anonymous sex, and a center of sex-based, psychologically-unbalanced violence.
Merely having a character mention that "not all gay life is like this" does not undo the visceral effects of the images, any more than having a character in "The Silence of the Lambs" say, "Buffalo Bill is not a transsexual, he's just a man who wants to become a women." The subtle distinction would be lost on most people.
Imagine if, during the civil rights era, one of the first major motion pictures dealing with issues concerning blacks was not "Guess Whose Coming To Dinner?", but was a police procedural about the hunt for a black male killer who rapes and murders white women. And if even most of the non-criminal black men in the movie were shown to be constantly lusting after white women, as if that were the most important thing in their emotional lives. And these were the only black men in the movie - no black detectives, no black friends of the main characters.
I doubt if having one character say "but not all Negroes are like that" would take away the sting.
Today there is a much wider variety of images of gays in popular culture, and more people in real life actually know gays, so the effect of a movie like "Cruising" would be lessened. But there's still a balance missing. Today's (many, many) television police procedurals, for example, have accepted gays as victims, perpetrators, and witnesses. And I have no objections to seeing gay villains. But note that gays never appear among the main-cast detectives (which today always include blacks, Hispanics, and women, so at least we've made some progress). They're always part of the chaos, never part of the order.
--SpectrumRider
(To reply, click here.)
My first thought after reading this was, "those were the days, my friend, we thought they would never end." But they did.
Looking back as a gay activist that participated in the protest and boycotts of this film at the Bruin in Westwood, California, I now see this as the calm before the storm. Those pre-AIDS protests were a bit more fun and frivolous. We were only fighting for the way we were portrayed and trying to avoid the promotion of gay bashing. Looking back now, it seems minor and it shouldn't. We got sidetracked trying to save our friends' lives as well as our own while Ronald Reagan sat on his fat ass coming up with one liners.
I have always been caught in a catch 22 since then, as I refuse to see a movie that I protested, yet I protested a movie I did not see. I would think it would seem very dated at this point and if I am going to see anything for nostalgic reasons, it will be Patti Smith or Valley of the Dolls.
Still an activist at the age of 50, I only wish that I had time to worry about Cruising on any level.
--Jack Jett
(To reply, click here.)
(9/13)