How Cruis­ing expos­es the dan­gers of inter­nalised homophobia

Police patrol­men DiS­i­mone (Joe Spinell) and Desh­er (Mike Starr) cruise in their radio car through Brooklyn’s Meat­pack­ing dis­trict, noto­ri­ous for its noc­tur­nal night­clubs and BDSM scene. ​“They’re all scum­bags,” says Desh­er as he sur­veys the streets filled with leather-clad men, while DiS­i­mone declares of the wife who has just left him after 10 years of mar­riage, ​“I’ll get that bitch.”

Spinell was also in the open­ing scene of Mar­tin Scorsese’s Taxi Dri­ver, and this sequence at the begin­ning of William Friedkin’s Cruis­ing recalls Travis Bick­le dri­ving through a red light dis­trict and com­ment­ing that, ​“One day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets,” or lis­ten­ing to a cus­tomer (played by Scors­ese him­self) promis­ing to mur­der his own cheat­ing wife. Bick­le may seem, from the pro­tec­tive bub­ble of his cab, above and beyond the ills that he observes, but he is, with­out real­is­ing it, very much a part of the dis­ease against which he sets him­self up as cure. The same is true with DiS­i­mone and Desh­er, who arrest a pair of trans­ves­tite hus­tlers only to take sex­u­al advan­tage of them.

“How do you know they’re cops?”, Cap­tain Edel­son (Paul Sorvi­no) asks when one of the trans­ves­tites lodges a com­plaint. ​“You know how many guys I arrest­ed last year for imper­son­at­ing a cop? There’s more guys out there imper­son­at­ing cops than there are actu­al cops.” That ambi­gu­i­ty cuts to the very heart of Cruis­ing, which repeat­ed­ly cross­es the thin blue line between cops and their quar­ry, as police offi­cer Steve Burns (Al Paci­no) is sent under­cov­er to inves­ti­gate a series of mur­ders in New York’s leather bar scene. Indeed, it is an ambi­gu­i­ty enshrined in the film’s very title, giv­en that ​‘cruis­ing’ can equal­ly refer to a police car on patrol, or to a quest for casu­al gay sex.

Steve takes the assign­ment with ambi­tions to climb the greasy pole fast. But even as he dress­es up in the den­im, leathers, hat and coloured han­ky that are the sig­ni­fiers of this gay com­mu­ni­ty, the bars he fre­quents are teem­ing not just with actu­al cops out on the pull after hours but also with civil­ian men who often appro­pri­ate the appar­el of law enforce­ment (with all its fetishis­tic asso­ci­a­tions of dom­i­nance). In one irony-laden sequence, Steve is expelled from a club for being the only man present not dressed in a police uniform.

In films about under­cov­er oper­a­tions, it is a well-worn trope that the cop should begin to lose track of which side he is bat­ting for. In Cruis­ing, this trope plays out through Steve’s con­fu­sion about his sex­u­al­i­ty. On the one hand, he is a straight man – very much loved by his girl­friend Nan­cy (Karen Allen) – strug­gling to find his way through a queer scene. On the oth­er, he is a deeply repressed gay man dis­cov­er­ing for the first time who he real­ly is. He might even, caught between desire and denial, be the killer – or at least a killer in the mak­ing – repeat­ed­ly and vio­lent­ly arrest­ing the objects of his own illic­it fantasies.

“You fin­gered him,” says Edel­son when Steve objects to the ter­ri­ble mis­treat­ment suf­fered by one of his pick­ups at the hands of his police inter­roga­tors. ​“I fin­gered him,” Steve con­cedes, ​“but I didn’t think any­one was going to go that far with him.” Here there is a com­plete slip­page between the lan­guages of police inves­ti­ga­tion and of homo­erot­ic activ­i­ty (“We’re up to our ass in this,” Edel­son lat­er tells Steve), as pro­ce­dur­al is sweati­ly eroti­cised and sex­u­al trans­ac­tions are reduced to mas­cu­line pow­er play.

Here Steve’s ​‘under­cov­er’ sta­tus serves as a metaphor for his clos­et­ed­ness (and vice ver­sa) – while mur­der is com­mit­ted at the behest of an inter­nalised pater­nal voice of author­i­ty that regards homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as a guilt that must be blood­i­ly expunged. Our man is mur­der­ing oth­er gay men to kill the homo­sex­u­al­i­ty with­in him­self (of which dad­dy dis­ap­proved). He is a Nor­man Bates-esque psy­cho, only fix­at­ed on a dis­ap­prov­ing, bul­ly­ing father instead of mother.

Through all this, Cruis­ing chal­lenges view­ers – espe­cial­ly straight male view­ers – by pre­sent­ing a line-up of high­ly sex­u­alised mas­cu­line beau­ty, and invit­ing us to respond either with an arousal like that of the bars’ lib­er­at­ed rev­ellers, or with a dis­gust like that of the big­ot­ed, some­times con­flict­ed cops, or even of the deranged, self-loathing murderer(s). Where exact­ly on this spec­trum of respons­es the ever slip­pery Steve falls remains unclear until the end, but as he says to Nan­cy, ​“What I’m doing is affect­ing me,” and the sus­pi­cion remain that his walk on the wild side has changed him for­ev­er. When he tells Nan­cy in the final sequence, ​“I’m back”, we won­der what else, besides his killer cos­tume of leathers and reflec­tive shades, he has brought back with him, even as we last see him star­ing into the bath­room mir­ror and appar­ent­ly pon­der­ing these self­same ques­tions of identity.

Draw­ing as much on recent real unsolved mur­ders as on Ger­ald Walker’s 1970 nov­el of the same name, Cruis­ing real­ly is a film of inter­me­di­ate states. It is not just that Steve finds him­self cruis­ing between the straight and queer, but the film’s tale of inves­tiga­tive infil­tra­tions and furtive entries falls some­where between a cel­e­bra­tion of gay lib­er­a­tion and a para­noid take on inter­nal homo­pho­bia. Fried­kin him­self offers up some­thing slip­ping into the crack between two of his pre­vi­ous films: the NYPD pro­ce­dur­al of his pre­vi­ous, The French Con­nec­tion, and the Satan­ic strug­gles of The Exor­cist, as Offi­cer Burns and the killer try to cast out what they per­ceive as the dev­il inside them.

Most of all, the film is caught between Friedkin’s desire to cast an unwa­ver­ing eye over a taboo sub­cul­ture, and the censor’s reluc­tance to grant an R rat­ing. This led Fried­kin to vis­it the MPAA 50 times, and even­tu­al­ly to remove 40 min­utes of hard­core footage from the film, cut­ting it up like one of this mur­der mystery’s vic­tims. That footage has since gone miss­ing from the vaults, and may well have been destroyed by Unit­ed Artists, so per­haps the clos­est we will ever come to see­ing it is the dif­fi­cult-to-cat­e­gorise metacin­e­mat­ic ​‘mak­ing-of’ docu­d­ra­ma Inte­ri­or. Leather Bar, in which Travis Math­ews and James Fran­co reimag­ine what film­ing those sequences might have been like then and would be like now in very dif­fer­ent times.

“Every gay group in the city is stomp­ing around my office every day,” Ever­son is told by the Chief of Detec­tives (Allan Mil­er). Much the same hap­pened to the film itself, whose loca­tion shoots were repeat­ed­ly dis­rupt­ed by pro­test­ers shin­ing lights and blow­ing whis­tles and airhorns, and whose the­atri­cal release was met with fur­ther demon­stra­tions. The irony is that these protests were large­ly prej­u­di­cial, where­as much of Brooklyn’s gay S&M com­mu­ni­ty hap­pi­ly con­tributed to the film and appeared in the back­ground of the club­bing scenes. Indeed, Cruis­ing does not demonise homo­sex­u­al­i­ty in gen­er­al, or indeed the leather-clad sub­cul­ture – rather it expos­es the con­tra­dic­tions and poten­tial dan­gers of any self-loathing gay man who turns his inter­nalised homo­pho­bia vio­lent­ly upon him­self and his own.

It is also dif­fi­cult to resist read­ing the ran­dom mur­ders that sweep through the gay com­mu­ni­ty in the film as an alle­go­ry for the AIDS cri­sis, whose effects were just start­ing to be felt in 1980 even if the con­di­tion had not yet been named. So Cruis­ing, all at once pre­scient and utter­ly equiv­o­cal about its cen­tral char­ac­ter and sub­ject mat­ter, ensures that view­er reac­tions to its provo­ca­tions are com­pli­cat­ed and uncom­fort­able. This is exact­ly what should be expect­ed of a gial­lo-esque noir, although in queer­ing the con­ven­tions of those gen­res, Fried­kin also revi­talis­es them.

Cruis­ing is released on Blu-ray by Arrow Films in a brand new restora­tion from a 4K scan of the orig­i­nal cam­era neg­a­tive super­vised and approved by writer/​director William Fried­kin on 19 August.