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.
No one at the time celebrated Cruising’s pathbreaking and realistic representation of gay sexuality and nightlife. (Friedkin insisted on filming actual leather bars and their patrons.) Instead, it was protested by gay activists who picketed the set and sometimes stormed screenings, with apocalyptic rhetoric about how Cruising was itself tantamount to murder.
Friedkin was no homophobe. He had already made a movie, The Boys in the Band (1970), that featured a night-long, melodramatic conversation among several self-hating gays that is both a thankfully dated plea for tolerance and a still-accurate depiction of a homosexual bitch-fest. In a 2007 interview, the director suggested that he was taking gay representation beyond the winking references of Rock Hudson movies, while also arguing that the movie is fundamentally a typical murder story, “not a cautionary tale for gays” or even about the gay community. (According to Friedkin, Steven Spielberg was briefly committed to directing the movie.)
Pacino himself had portrayed, in Dog Day Afternoon (1975), a character in a relationship with, as Pacino puts it in Sonny Boy, “a person who identifies as a woman and who today we would understand is transgender.” He then adds, “If people think that I helped to advance a particular issue of representation, that’s fine.”
It’s unclear who, exactly, Pacino thinks might be thanking him for playing a chaser in Dog Day Afternoon. It is clear, however, that he knows no one was or is thanking him for Cruising. The movie wasn’t exactly a disaster, in financial or artistic terms. It made a few million dollars. It’s interestingly shot, with lurid colors and odd tracking movements through walk-and-talk sequences in which hard-boiled cops and criminals banter.
Nor is it by any means one of Pacino’s worst performances, which is actually part of the problem. His character seems neither disgusted nor aroused by his assignment. He listens to a gay neighbor talk at him with the same indifferent stare that he uses to get through evenings with his girlfriend. Homosexuality and heterosexuality, domesticity and murder, all come off as pretty dull. It’s as if Friedkin and Pacino were afraid of making the character appear homophobic (or overly curious). Compared to that year’s other major murder-thriller featuring a queer villain, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, Cruising hardly registers as problematic by today’s standards.
Friedkin suggested that he was taking gay representation beyond the winking references of Rock Hudson movies, while also arguing that the movie is fundamentally a typical murder story, “not a cautionary tale for gays.”
Neither the straight liberal media nor the burgeoning gay press were bored by the film. They were outraged. In Christopher Street, the leading gay magazine of the time (Pacino’s gay neighbor wears a T-shirt with its logo to brunch), editor Charles Ortleb claimed that Cruising would lead to violence against gay men. The movie does depict street youths and cops beating gays, but from the main character’s response, it’s clear that audiences are encouraged to see such violence as a bad thing.
Ortleb, though, was less interested in what was actually on-screen than in taking an opportunity to consolidate gay activism around a common cause. Protesting the film let gays appear on the news as a united, angry movement rather than as libertines or victims. To Ortleb, Cruising was part of a broader “pre-Holocaust” strategy by the straight “Superstructure” to prepare public opinion for an all-out campaign against gays.
Ortleb, who has in recent years become one of the country’s leading pandemic-conspiracy theorists, was regarded as something of a crank in the gay community even then. But it was understandable that some saw Friedkin as somehow allied to Jerry Falwell. In the years just before AIDS, gay men had achieved a new cultural visibility and political clout but were also suffering from a backlash accompanying the rise of the Christian right. Comparisons were frequently made to Weimar Germany: Hadn’t sexual minorities been having a good time in the Berlin of the 20s? And look what happened to them!
That straight people also lost their heads about the movie requires more explanation. The New Yorker, for example, called Cruising “repellent” and argued that it served “only to encourage our ignorance and our prurient fear of these matters.” Cruising may be a limp thriller, and its sleaze is less than arousing, but it’s filled with well-observed details, from the cans of Crisco to the copies of Honcho. (The incidental music at the bars could have used a proper homosexual consultant, though.)
Protesting the film let gays appear on the news as a united, angry movement rather than as libertines or victims.
Urban-gay-male life in the 70s truly was, as novelist Brad Gooch put it in the title of his 1996 roman à clef, The Golden Age of Promiscuity. The culture of anonymous hookups and elaborate fetishes had its critics and satirists in the gay community, most notably Larry Kramer. Many gays who might have enjoyed cruising the parks and piers seethed when their practices appeared in the mainstream media. Activists vigorously protested the 1980 CBS special “Gay Power, Gay Politics,” in part for focusing what was felt to be a disproportionate amount of time on leather aficionados.
Heterosexual sex, too, was becoming more frequent, elaborate, public, commercial, and violent. While the hippies of the previous decade dreamed about how “free love” would liberate the world, sex in the 70s was very much for sale. De-industrialized neighborhoods were turned over to porno theaters, adult bookstores, and prostitution. Previously fringe sexual practices became part of ordinary heterosexual life—or at least of the fantasies—while serial killers, gay and straight, who combined murder with sexual violence filled the nation’s nightmares.
New York intellectuals, from Midge Decter to Susan Sontag, fretted that newly liberated homosexuals, embracing a macho mystique and sadomasochist sex, were the vanguard of this devolution, dragging the rest of the country into moral barbarism and possibly fascism. (You know who else wore leather? That’s right: Nazis.) The New Yorker’s accusations that Friedkin was stoking ignorance and fear, seen in this light, look less like a defense of a beleaguered minority and more like an admission that for the cultural elite, gay sex—or sex itself—had gotten out of hand.
Gays and straights alike have gotten over Cruising. Although periodically described as a “cult” film, it has not been taken up, even ironically, by contemporary homosexuals. The movie’s most dedicated fan appears to be James Franco, who directed a short film titled Interior. Leather Bar. in 2013 that purports to be the 40 minutes Friedkin cut from his movie. Franco’s homage is somehow both more explicit and less erotic than the original.
But even bad sex isn’t guilt-free. Pacino—still fathering children in his 80s—expresses what seems like more than perfunctory discomfort with his role in Cruising. He tells readers of his memoir that it “was an exploitative film” and insists that he donated his earnings (“and it was a lot”) to unspecified “charities.” Frankly, I’d be readier to forgive him for making the movie if I knew he’d had fun making it, or at least enjoyed spending the money. Cheer up, Al—at least you didn’t make Interior. Leather Bar.
Blake Smith is a writer and translator who lives in Chicago
