Gay serial-killer movie 'Cruising' finally released on DVD

William Friedkin’s gay serial killer movie ‘Cruising’ is available on DVD for the first time. Programmer of the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival Brian Robinson considers its impact

I can remember being handed a leaflet in a gay bar in London around the time of the release of ‘Cruising’ in 1980 and being slightly nervous. I hadn’t seen the film but there were cries from the US to have it banned. I’d read about people trying to disrupt shooting and picketing the film saying that it portrayed a negative stereotype of gays.

The film stars Al Pacino as a cop who goes undercover in the New York leather bar scene in order to solve a series of murders and ends up, well, becoming a little sexually confused.

When I finally saw it, I thought it was very interesting that gay life wasn’t the subplot, but the crux of the film.

Its director, William Friedkin, had already produced one of the seminal gay films of the ’70s with ‘The Boys in the Band’, but here he was dealing with a gay world where people didn’t just go to have drinks and polite chats; it was overtly, defiantly sexual. That was liberating in the mid-’80s as Britain definitely looked to America as a kind of paradise for gays, especially places like New York and San Francisco.

‘Cruising’ is carefully constructed and Friedkin visited some notorious clubs to do his research. Also, a lot of the people in the film are real gays, so in some ways it does have an authentic feel, similar to his previous ‘The French Connection’ (1971). It almost works as
a nostalgic look back to the golden age of pre-Aids New York, but there are a few too many muscle men dressed in PVC police uniforms and licking their truncheons in the background.

It’s a voyeur’s film, because many who watch it will never go to an S&M club like the Meat Rack in Greenwich Village, where friends have told me they have seen people fucking on the dance floor. In that aspect, ‘Cruising’ is daring and doesn’t fudge the explicit sexuality. It doesn’t pander to the illusion that gay men just like to hold hands, but focuses on the promiscuity emerging at the time.

As a representation of the scene, it covers a range of fetish interests, but I think there may have been more of a homogeneity in reality. I have a clear memory of seeing the film for the first time. There’s the scene in which Pacino does poppers and starts dancing crazily, while in the background a man is being fisted. I don’t think that would have really happened, and I think the reality of what I can remember was darker, seedier and more intense.

However, there is a dark side to ‘Cruising’ and I do think it is confused. The big objection at the time stemmed from the fact that it suggests that it’s these faint homosexual yearnings that turn poor, lovable, straight Al Pacino into a murderer. I remember buying a set of lobby cards for ‘Cruising’ and I gave it to a gay friend who I thought would appreciate it. He was a leather queen but found it deeply upsetting as a film, especially in the pernicious way it implied that there is a link between S&M and murder. Perhaps the denouement is more eccentric than dangerous, but it’s undeniably a powerful, thought-provoking work.

‘Cruising’ is available now on DVD.

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