Al Pacino’s new memoir, Sonny Boy, features a series of photos marking various points in his career, along with charmingly self-deprecating captions. (“Richard III on Broadway… Now, do I look like I set Shakespeare back fifty years?”) There are, however, no pictures of him wearing leather, hauling around vintage gay porn, or huffing poppers on the set of Cruising, a movie about which he seems embarrassed, defensive, and apologetic.
Written and directed by the wildly talented William Friedkin, who already had The Exorcist and The French Connection in his back pocket, the 1980 film stars Pacino as a heterosexual cop sent to infiltrate New York’s gay-leather-bar scene and find a serial killer. Based on a real string of murders that had been chronicled in The Village Voice by Arthur Bell and which inspired Felice Picano’s 1979 novel, The Lure, Cruising features a then unprecedented panorama of the gay subculture in the neighborhood around Christopher Street. It also shows what must be Hollywood’s first (and last?) simulated fisting and offers a partial explanation of the “hanky code,” both of which, like the curly mullets seen on several characters, I’d prefer to keep in the 70s.
