Cruising (1980) and the controversial history of gay clubs on-screen
William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising is a case study on the polemics of portraying gay nightlife on-screen. In the film, Al Pacino plays Steve Burns, an undercover cop who gets involved in New York’s gay S&M scene whilst investigating a serial killer. In what has become known as the most notorious scene from the film, Steve visits a leather bar and partakes in what the gay nightlife has to offer; sweat, sodomy, performance, and poppers.
Taking notes from the Italian neo-realist, Friedkin strove to authentically replicate the gay S&M scene by filming an actual gay club in New York’s meat packing district with clubgoing “extras”.1 The director would go on to say on record that “[he] didn’t give any direction to the people in these scenes; [he] just asked them to do their thing and let me film it”. Therefore, these scenes carry documentary weight in their exhibition of private gay spaces that often go unseen (Miller 2021, 54).
However, as Eddie Gamboa has acknowledged in his ethnographic study on queer nightlife (“Pedagogies of the Dark”), whilst clubs provide a refuge for queer people (one that evades social surveillance), their disclosure in scholarship runs the risk of “outing” spaces of queer intimacy that are already susceptible to regulation (2021, 91-92). The discourse surrounding how queer nightlife is documented can also be applied to cinema, as filmmakers have historically filmed gay clubs and lesbian bars without taking into account the potential ramifications on its patrons. In Cruising’s DVD commentary, Fredkin said that the film was not intended to be homophobic but rather a murder mystery with a “unique” gay leather scene backdrop.2 Yet, before filming had even finished, Cruising received backlash from gay activists and critics. Vocal members of the community called for a boycott of the film on the grounds that Cruising perpetuated harmful stereotypes surrounding homo killers and the perverse underworld milieus of homosexuality (Braddy & Huff 2018, 117).3
However, Friedkin was not the first director to shoot on location to capture the essence of queer nightlife. The 1968 film The Killing of Sister George (Robert Aldrich) was the first Hollywood film to not only contain a scene set in a lesbian bar but to be shot on location.4 Director Robert Aldrich was reportedly determined to gain access to a lesbian space in order to exploit the cultural fascination with lesbian nightlife and use it as a promotional tool for the film (Kelly 2001, 6). Whilst Aldrich gained permission from the heterosexual owners of The Gateways Club to film there, consent was not given by its patrons, many of whom were fired from their jobs upon the film’s release (Kelly 2001, 13).
Over the past decade, Cruising has undergone a critical reappraisal from queer audiences who have revisited the film and its initial response from members of the community. Recent scholarship has argued that much of the pushback from gay activists at the time was foregrounded in the belief that wider acceptance would be achieved through the normalization of gay men by Hollywood hegemonies. These gays were “just like everyone else” and palatable to heterosexual audiences, as opposed to accurate representations of queer counterpublics (Braddy & Huff 2018, 102; Kirp 1996, 1). It ought to be mentioned that, despite the initial opposition from members of the community, 1600 gay men participated in the filming of Cruising, many of whom welcomed the opportunity to shed light on a subsection of the gay community that had not (up until that point) been represented in mainstream cinema (McCracken 2017).
Cruising holds up as not only a pre-AIDS time capsule but an unflinching depiction of queer carnality after dark.
Reference List
Braddy, Jon, and Billy Huff. 2018. “CHAPTER 6: Queerness Underground: The Abject, the Normal, and Pleasure in Cruising and Interior.Leather Bar.” At the Interface / Probing the Boundaries 93 (January): 101–23. doi:10.1163/9789004382299_008.
Gamboa, Eddie. 2021. “Pedagogies of the Dark: Making Sense of Queer Nightlide.” In Queer Nightlife, edited by Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani, and Romon H. Rivera-Servera, 91-100. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=e180fbb1-482b-35e1-9964-10c574f67716.
Hankin, Kelly. 2001. “Lesbian Locations: The Production of Lesbian Bar Space in ‘The Killing of Sister George.’” Cinema Journal 41 (1): 3–27. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=c967a96a-404d-392a-a34f-f5d007bf5a5e
Kirp, David L. 1996. “How Gays Lost It at the Movies.” Dissent 43 (1): 89. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=83b0c4cc-84b3-309c-9756-6a5d78af0bb5.
McCracken, Chelsea. 2017. “The Controversy of Cruising.” Cinematheque. Published April 4, 2017. https://cinema.wisc.edu/blog/2017/04/14/controversy-cruising
Miller, D. A. 2021. Second Time Around : From Art House to DVD. Columbia University Press. https://research.ebsco.com/linkprocessor/plink?id=62eb7cb8-1889-3b0d-8638-0bb83823116f.
Whilst the film was meant to be set at the Manhattan BDSM bar, Mineshaft, Friedkin was not allowed to film in the club so instead filmed at Hellfire Club, which was decorated to resemble Mineshaft.
Friedkin had to remove 40 minutes of the leather bar footage to garner an R rating for the film, which James Franco later reimagined in his 2013 film titled Interior. Leather Bar.
In August of 1979, 800 protestors marched to the film site of Cruising and picketed (Braddy & Huff 2018, 101)
In August of 1979, 800 protestors marched to the film site of Cruising and picketed (Braddy & Huff 2018, 101)