She Wrote With a Straight Face

An amusing article in the latest issue of Film Comment magazine by Melissa Anderson, the editor of Time Out New York, reflects on the controversy that surrounded the release of the Al Pacino movie Cruising, now finally out on DVD.

Pacino's cop simultaneously digs and is terrified by the bars he must frequent to catch the killer. "This film is not intended as an indictment of the homosexual world. It is set in one small segment of that world, which is not meant to be representative of the whole," reads the disclaimer at the very beginning of Cruising, surely added in response to the gay protests. But what a world it is. Filming actual Meatpacking District clubs like the Anvil, the Ramrod, and the Eagle as sexy, stygian pleasure-domes, Friedkin shows, with absolutely no judgment, men (who were, for the most part, actual habitues of the scene) kissing, sucking each other off, and, in a scene that still astonishes with its audacity, getting fist-fucked. Only the New Queer Cinema landmark Poison, with its outlaw homo protagonists, comes even close to rivaling the film's display of sex as rough, ritualized, reckless. To paraphrase Lolita's tagline: how did they ever make a movie of Cruising? Just remember: a major studio—United Artists—greenlit some of the rawest, raunchiest man-on-man action American cinema has ever seen.

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But can't Cruising also be seen as a Pre-AIDS artifact that actively advances the homosexual agenda? Filmmaker Todd Downing, 34, whose 2001 short, Jeffrey's Hollywood Screen Trick, spoofs the insipid gay rom-coms that were ubiquitous in the Nineties, thinks so. "This ostensibly straight man played by Pacino gets sucked into an underworld and is undeniably intrigued and turned on by it," he says. "He can't get enough of it and is so obsessed that it puts strains on his relationships at work and at home. And the scenes in the bar couldn't have been more lovingly photographed: slow pans across men cruising and having sex, all in lighting that couldn't be more flattering. It makes the leather scene look incredibly seductive." Perhaps one person's toxic stereotype is another's turn-on. Downing, like me, is a queer Gen-Xer. I don't think we're idealizing a cultural and political moment (not to mention a pre-Stella McCartney Meatpacking District) that we never participated in so much as we're responding to radical representations of queer sexuality financed by Hollywood. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal wear their colored bandanas around their necks in Brokeback Mountain; high-altitude fucks aren't the same as sex while high on amyl nitrate. But in deference to one who did participate, I leave the last word to [experimental filmmaker Jim] Hubbard: "If I had known that our protests against Cruising would lead to Will & Grace, I never would've done it."