Was It Good For The Gays: ‘Cruising’

If you’re going to make a movie about queer people, you’re likely going to get a divisive response. Does it reinforce negative stereotypes? Does it provide an accurate cross-section of the diverse LGBT community? How many think pieces will it incite? In this regular column, we’ll look at depictions of queers in cinema and ask, Was It Good For The Gays? Today, a look back at William Friedkin‘s controversial thriller, Cruising.

Released in 1980, Cruising was a commercial and critical flop, primarily because of its subject matter. When gay groups caught wind of the film’s production the previous summer — something about a cop going undercover into the seedy underbelly of New York City gay life to catch a killer may have seemed a little distasteful — mass protests took place near the film’s sets. Both Friedkin and the film’s star, Al Pacino, attempted to cool off the negative publicity by suggesting that the film was being produced with its production team’s full understanding that the S&M community portrayed in the film did not represent the entire gay community as a whole. (Pacino even compared the film to mafia dramas like The Godfather, suggesting that the leather scene was just a facet of the larger gay community similar to organized crime within the Italian community.)

Filled with extreme, graphic sex (much of which was cut from the film to avoid an X rating) and incorporating a complicated, psychological plot line, Cruising has, in the years since its release, developed a cult following. Yet the film still retains its infamous status as an anti-gay, exploitative film. But is it really that bad? Let’s break it down.

The Pros: Let’s discuss first what is so shocking about Cruising: the unabashedly gay sex. There’s a lot of it here, and, to be fair, it’s very extreme. Sure, this seems like a porny exaggeration of what gay sex actually is (watersports, fisting, poppers, ropes, and whips, are on gleeful display here), but that it was put in a mainstream film by an Oscar-winning director in 1980 is particularly staggering. Yes, it’s meant to shock the audience. (I’m still not sure who Cruising was made for, as the sex is too graphic for people who would go in thinking that gay guys are horrible monsters, and the film’s controversial nature would probably turn off anyone who might be turned-on by the movie.) But as I rewatched the film, I couldn’t help but find the sex — the sex that wasn’t violent, at least, and the sex that happened before any murdering took place — shot with much more realism than anything in a “serious” (read: tame, depressing, and relatively sexless) film about gay men (such as Brokeback Mountain or Milk) because Cruising actually shows it.

I can’t think of another movie that pits the police against a marginalized community in the way that Cruising does. From the opening scene, in which two cops harass a pair of transvestite prostitutes (surprisingly butch transvestites, by the way), to the interrogation scene in which a suspect is brutally beaten by several policemen, Cruising shows how homophobic and bullying New York City cops still were in the years post-Stonewall. Even Burns himself begins to question the motives of the department, wondering if they’re really looking for a killer who is preying on young men or if they’re just looking for a gay man to vilify.

The Cons: Well, you can’t really deny that Friedkin was asserting something in the first murder scene when he intercuts between a man being stabbed in the back and scenes of anal penetration. So, yes, that’s kind of an issue, isn’t it?

There’s a lot that Cruising gets wrong about the gay experience — and I mean the modern gay experience, as I was not around when the film was made. The film, like more mainstream depictions of the gay male community, doesn’t show how diverse the culture really is, instead focusing entirely on the S&M subculture. It fits the theme, for sure, providing the perfect scene into which a straight-laced cop goes undercover and possibly experiences an identity crisis. But, c’mon, gay bars aren’t all whips and chains and punk rock and fisting. (Some of us like showtunes and Robyn!)

Friedkin tries to give a look into the less extreme work of the urban gay man with the character of Ted, the man who lives next door to Burns when he moves into his Greenwich Village apartment. The opposite of the men Burns encounters in the Meatpacking District, Ted is a twinky playwright. But he’s also trapped within a personal culture of violence; his overbearing boyfriend and roommate, Gregory, attacks Burns when he comes looking for Ted later in the film. In Cruising‘s world, even those who don’t live on the extremes of gay culture can hardly avoid that dark influence.

Then there’s the ambiguous ending: Burns thinks he’s caught his killer, a schizophrenic music student who attacks him with a knife in the park. But once Ted winds up dead in a similar way, is it possible the killer is still at large? And is it possible that Burns, who has experienced some sort of psychological break, has been affected so much by the darkness of the S&M scene that he has, in turn, become a violent killer? That’s a pretty damning assumption: that any sexual practice, which is inherently rooted in pleasure and fun, is responsible for the destruction of one’s identity and morals. It’s no wonder people thought Cruising to be homophobic; the only slice of the gay experience it depicts is pretty evil.

Also, there’s the dancing. When Al Pacino goes to one of the leather bars, sniffs some poppers, and cuts loose? It was not good for the gays, the cops, the Italians… It was really not good for anybody.

The Verdict: Cruising suffers from many flaws; its plot falls apart in the third act, the characterization is rather broad, and the sound design, which features sloppily dubbed dialogue in the style of a classic Italian film, distracts the audience from the gritty realism it otherwise could have maintained. But its biggest problem, no doubt, is how it represents the gay community. Sure, Friedkin had no intention of portraying all gay men as a whole as violent, drug-addicted leather daddies. But it’s hard to come away from the film without seeing this subculture within the context of the larger community.

There’s the hint of this, of course, not only with the Ted character, but also with the (very limited) backstories of the killer’s victims. These are professional men, whose daytime lifestyles did not match the dark nature of what happened after sundown. Could this notion have been more established? Absolutely.

But Cruising is a valuable film because of its flaws. I still find it difficult to write the film off as anti-gay; in reality, it’s a very progressive film considering the time in which it was made. And that Friedkin directed, just ten years prior, The Boys in the Band, which is one of the best and honest depictions of gay men in cinema, proves that this was not just morbid curiosity on the director’s part. He didn’t set out for Cruising to be a gay movie; he simply wanted to make something intriguing. I understand how some might take umbrage with the community used as a backdrop, but on the list of outrageous depictions of gay men throughout the history of film, I am willing to give this one a pass.

Was Cruising good for the gays? Probably not. But it’s wasn’t terrible for the gays, either. Like most things, it rests firmly in the middle.

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Photos: Lorimar / Everett Collection