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
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StumbleUponYet watching the movie today, it's a bit hard to understand what everyone was so upset about. Friedkin worked to ground his film in reality. Before shooting began, he befriended patrons of bars like the Anvil, Mine Shaft, and Ramrod, and even paid them as extras, lending the movie an admirable authenticity. Some real leather daddies—granddaddies today—will no doubt complain that Friedkin exaggerated the barroom bacchanalia for dramatic effect. In one memorable scene, Burns and an admirer huff ethyl chloride on the dance floor as a fantasia of debauchery transpires around them—disco lights illuminate an orgy in one corner of the bar, and an ingenious use of Crisco in another.
Yet from the outset, the film makes clear that this scene is on the fringe. Burns' boss, Capt. Edelson (Paul Sorvino), describes the world the murder victims inhabit as "not the mainstream of gay life. They were into heavy leather, S&M, a world unto itself." And once Burns becomes immersed in that world, he never comments on its morality. That decision is left to the viewer.
Perhaps as a result, neither the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, as it is called today, nor the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, a media watchdog organization, plan to issue statements this month denouncing Cruising, which in addition to being released on DVD is also being revived in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
"Today we have other movies, other representations, other media to help counter negative images," says Damon Romine, GLAAD's entertainment media director. "We know now that not all gay men are bad guys."
We also now know that some gay men are bad guys. We can explore the idea, as Cruising does, that sexual confusion can push a disturbed person over the edge. Friedkin believes this was the motivation for some of the real-life murders the film was based on: "A lot of dirty, sick people questioned their own sexuality and found a lot of question marks—and took it out on gay people," he told me recently.
Such an exploration is incongruous with the upbeat "gay" entertainment (Will & Grace, Queer Eye, etc.) we're consistently fed today. Even gay thugs and murderers—Vito Spatafore on The Sopranos, or Bree's son Andrew on Desperate Housewives—are somehow likable these days. Cruising, on the other hand, never serves up any witty brunch banter or fabulous shopping sprees. It also avoids the emotional heartbreak of a Brokeback Mountain or just about any AIDS drama. The leather men in Friedkin's movie don't complain that they're victims of a prejudiced society, but they also make no apologies for their "lifestyle."
It's strange that such a portrayal so offended gay activists at the time. But it's reassuring to see that that community seems to have learned something over the last generation. When the Larry Craig story broke, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force quickly worked to steer the discussion toward the hypocrisy of the family values set. Closeted, self-loathing men still pose a danger to the gay community. But the ones in William Friedkin's movie aren't the ones we need to worry about.
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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)