Thursday, September 23, 2021

Is 'Cruising' a disgusting movie or a misunderstood cult classic?

 In 1980, a movie called Cruising came out and caused a firestorm. It starred Al Pacino as a New York detective who goes undercover  as a gay man in the leather district in order to find a serial killer. It was controversial because it was vile and sordid. It took a lot of negative stereotypes about gay men and went into overdrive, particularly the one about realizing that you're gay causes you to become a killer. Needless to say it caused extensive protests even while being made and subsequently bombed at the box office.

I've seen it and thought it was disgusting. But once I showed a clip of it to a younger gay man - as in grew up in the post Ellen DeGeneres comes out/ Will and Grace world. He didn't find it to be as nauseous as I did. And that's the subject of this blog post. I have included the trailer and a full scene (NSFW) of Cruising as well as interviews with protestors. I'm curious to hear your thoughts. Feel free to respond in the comments section

    

2 comments:

Michael Lehet said...

I "accidentally" saw this movie. We had family friends who owned a VCR and had joined a local video rental store and had picked up this movie and a few others. We were visiting and while our parents played cards they left the kids with "the movies I picked up today."

We started watching and everyone, except me, got bored and left....OMG they left 12 year old me sitting there watching this movie ALONE! I had no idea what it was at the time and looking back I don't remember how I felt.

Anonymous said...

There's something to be said about representation .it often doesn't appear as nice or palatable as we may like especially for marginalized people. But the fact that it can exist as archive for history, for a point of reference is fascinating. I'm a black transwoman from NYC and I just loved seeing facets of my physical and sexual/gender community in the 80s pre AIDS Era. Just my two cents. Great thought piece