“The leather scene of Cruising is simply a background for a murder mystery.” Ever since the filming of Cruising was disrupted by New York gay protesters in 1979, William Friedkin has made this point so often that, in his commentary on Cruising’s new DVD edition, doubtless impatient to be done with it once for all, he gives it the self-evidence of tautology: “The background of the leather bars … is simply a unique background.” But no amount of mantric repetition can change the fact that where Cruising is concerned, the leather scene, precisely for its “unique” aspect, is not, nor ever was, simply a background. On the contrary, without this background, Friedkin himself was not interested in the murder mystery. When he was first asked to adapt Gerald Walker’s 1970 source novel, whose homosexuals were slender, wore bangs, and did not, biblically speaking, know their ass from their elbow, he took a bored pass. That was before, wearing nothing but a jockstrap, and (just in case) accompanied by an armed mafia escort in the same costume, he started venturing into the Mine Shaft to see for himself the lately developed gay sex scene there. What he witnessed was galvanizing; it persuaded him that the novel, reset in this new milieu, could work on screen. His nocturnal visits recur in the film itself, where they are now paid by the protagonist Steve Burns (Al Pacino), a straight undercover cop who must infiltrate New York’s gay leather bars and clubs in pursuit of a Homo Killer. The correspondent tracking shots are what made Cruising thrilling in 1980; and even today, they remain unbanalizable.
It is easy to see why. Meandering through the darkness of bars whose patrons are as likely to be sucking dick as swilling beer—and where even that beer seems destined to be pissed out on men expectantly sitting in bathtubs for the purpose—the shots cast an almost blinding illumination on a sexuality that had been so deep in shadow as to be, until now, cinematically invisible. From being barely able to suggest what two gay men did at home between sheets, Hollywood suddenly proceeds to grant us a full and accurate idea of what scores of them were doing at the Anvil in slings. Very little cruising takes place in these shots (and that little appears satisfactorily concluded in fantastically short compass); most of the men are already getting off. No sad, solitary longing here; instead, a superabundant spectacle, as crowded with bodies as a Bosch painting, of acts and pleasures. The protesters were surely right to claim that Cruising continues a long Hollywood tradition of equating the homosexual and the homicidal, but in its predecessors—most notably Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951)—the homicidal was all we saw; even to let us see the “sexual” in the “homosexual” to any extent, let alone as copiously as Friedkin has done, is a territorial conquest worthy of Cortez. And James Contner’s cinematography rises to the occasion, washing the frieze of leather men with an ethereal blue light—exquisite halo for the denim and hardware on them—so that they stand out from their nooks and crannies like gilded saints in so many side-chapels. The film is scored to terrific original music from The Germs, whose punk pulsations, like everything else here, are too insistent to be just background.
Flyer protesting against the production of “Kruising.”
For all their manifest aesthetic enhancement, these shots also carry documentary power. To the brave new world being imaged, Friedkin brought the authenticating procedures of neorealism, using actual locations and mixing non-professionals in with his actors. These extras, not merely culled from the scene, were filmed actually performing the acts suggested. “I didn’t give any direction to the people in these scenes; I just asked them to do their thing and let me film it.” Though it lacks pornography’s explicitness, the film shares in pornography’s Bazinian embrace of the “ontology of the photographic image.” The real places aren’t simply like these; these are those places; the men in the background aren’t simply got up to resemble the men in the places; they are those men. Their nipple-play isn’t just play—or to put it differently, it’s just play, not the demanding “work” that it would be supposed to be for union extras. Cruising’s dioramas convince us that gay sex happens, and this, in a culture vitally concerned with destroying every trace of homosexual desire, is by no means a universally self-evident proposition. Arthur Bell, instigator of the protests, feared that Cruising might well “send gays running back to the closet,” but this misunderstands the probative force of the film’s near-pornography. It is much more likely to have sent closeted gays running to the clubs to confirm its verisimilitude. We had not previously seen anything remotely like this depiction on screen, and the happy historical moment that favored it—after Gay Liberation but before AIDS, when curious straight men like Friedkin (due precaution taken) could indulge their fascination with the scene—is unlikely to be repeated.
Gay neorealism.
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Friedkin grasps the originality of the scene quite as much as did Michel Foucault, who saw in these “laboratories of sexual experimentation,” as he called the SM backrooms of New York and San Francisco, a reinvention of sex, where “the idea is to make use of every part of the body as a sexual instrument.” Prominent in Cruising’s laboratories, certainly, is the anal caress, a fondness for which is attested both by the many red and navy blue handkerchiefs protruding from back pockets and, with less formality, by the abundance of bare asses on parade. No longer privatized, but proudly displayed, tattooed, hairy, even dirty, these backsides (like the background in toto) insist on coming to the fore of our attention. But this anal responsiveness strays not only to other parts of the body (the armpits to be sniffed, the nipples to be chewed or tugged), but also to the body as a whole. Sometimes, indeed, the plugging-in of sex organs seems almost incidental to what is more fundamentally an ecstatic, X-rated cuddle whose goal is to put every body in total erotic contact with every other.
“Our assholes are revolutionary!”
Rather than anything more shocking, then, the sexiest practice depicted here, the one that comes nearest to incarnating full body-readiness for each and every kind of embrace, is dancing. The dance floor provides a kind of sexual antechamber, where bodies, helpfully chloroformed with ethyl-soaked bandanas, anticipate all manner of exposure, touching, grouping. That is why the moment when Steve joins the dancing offers the most satisfying “gaying” of his character possible, all the more ingenious in that, given that he’s “the Pacino character,” we would never be allowed anything more explicit in any case. Unlike the conventionally coupled gay ballroom-dancing in Philadelphia (1993), Steve’s dancing extends tangibility over his whole body, so that whoever eventually touches that body—including his girlfriend Nancy (Karen Allen)—and wherever it is touched—including the least exceptionable spots—it has already wholly been given over to the homosexual drift. That is the implied meaning of the last shot, where Steve, his assignment over, shaves in front of a mirror; there, along with his haunted image, he discerns his Nancy behind him, wearing his leathers. Whom he has sex with will no longer prove much; his body has been desublimated, released from the organizational grip of sexual orientation. Is he now homosexual? All that seems certain is that he’s no longer not. He’s been queered.
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The people and streets of Rome in Open City (1945) feel as if caught sur le vif, but the Good Priest, the Homosexual Villain, the Sacrificial Mother, the Youth of Tomorrow, and so on, are plainly myths recycled from nineteenth-century fiction via Hollywood. This dissonance between background and story (characters, situations, dialogue) is basic to the neorealist project, wherever it emerges; more, it is what the project exists to harmonize, promoting ideology to the status of the real while reducing the real to the ideological meanings it hosts. In Cruising, however, the neorealist enterprise is given this turn of the screw: the authenticity of the bar sequences sanctions the film’s punitive wish to annihilate what it has glimpsed in them.
Follow the fist in this tightly compacted passage in the chapter called “Wanna Dance?” First we see a scene of fist-fucking—extreme in any case, unprecedented on the Hollywood screen; there are shots of both partners, but our vision is mainly oriented by the man in the sling. We cut to a close-up of Steve watching from further back in the same perspective, his huge eyes as utterly engrossed as Friedkin’s must have been on his first visit to the Mine Shaft, or, for that matter, as our own are likely to be at this very moment. Then, all of a sudden, a fist-fight breaks out between two patrons elsewhere in the club. The close-up of Steve looking marks—and masks—the transition between description and narrative: on one side of it, anonymous background figures who, however titillating, play no role in the unfolding story; on the other side, the arrival of a professional actor (Jay Acovone) playing a suspect, and, in his train, dramatic incident, enigma, psychology; the plot has visibly thickened. Under other circumstances, we might have observed that the verisimilitude—perhaps the reality—of the fisting has yielded to the almost comic implausibility—and unquestionable fictiveness—of a fist-fight in a gay club. But in this instance, any such perception is overwhelmed by the force majeure of a different sort of logic: the logic that would link, in any normal man, the prospect of being fisted to the speedy erection of his own dukes in defense. (The fighting words here: “Hey, asshole!”)
From fist-fucking …
… to fist-fighting.
Of course, Steve is not about to be fisted, nor is he involved in the fist-fight. He occupies a middle position between the two possibilities, not directly participating either in the “extreme sex” practiced by the gays, or in the violence that, albeit also here practiced by the gays, feels like its homophobic negation. But he’s shown taking them both in, as part of the same exorbitant eyeful; through these wholly fascinated eyes, he internalizes the diptych as what will become his own psychomachia, and, ambiguously, his own narrative trajectory. It is important to note how merely implicit all this is, even mystified. “A gay man, whom I don’t know, is using his fist on another gay man, whom I also don’t know”: this is the ambiguous Freudian dream that Steve entertains, and in it, his identification with both “victim” and “attacker” is buried alive in the self-ignorant relation of a fascination with the Other. Once we move from the background to a murder mystery starring Al Pacino, we say a decisive farewell to neorealism, and hello again to the celluloid closet, with all its strictly epistemological excitements. This closet gets reinstalled both in the story, as Steve’s secret, “repressed” desire, so constantly under social censorship that we can barely be sure of its reality, and in the story’s filming, as Friedkin’s corresponding style of innuendo, ambiguity, elision, symbolism, and displacement. Having just seen gay sex unambiguously presented in the background, we reenter the old hopeful/fearful state of wondering whether it will ever materialize in the foreground, just as we once wondered, in Rope, whether the insinuated homosexuality of the protagonists would ever find denotation.
The abundance of evidence that homosexual desire no longer has to take this form seems only to have sharpened the vengeance with which it must now be repudiated. For Steve’s Dream of the Fist replicates the film’s own expedient fantasy, already in place, of an unidentified Homo Killer, a gay who murders gays in the very impetus of gay desire. In this fantasy, there is no gay sex unaccompanied by gay violence, as its intrinsic punitive counteraction: no butt-fucking without back-stabbing, no blow job without spurts of blood in place of cum; no polymorphous perversity without the body literally in pieces and floating in the Hudson. These are sides of the same coin, and the coin could hardly be in wider circulation. In the novel, there was only one murderer to be hunted, but in the film, he is ubiquitous, his identity having been pointedly disseminated across a number of different actors and characters: the killer in murder no. 1 is the victim in murder no. 2, while the actor who plays the victim in murder no. 1 is … The idea is to establish a symbolic circuit whereby every gay man, at varying degrees of separation, becomes his own assassin. But—here’s the rub—the circuit is never quite closed; the overwhelmingly visible spectacle of gay male sex may be simply irresistible to any man who beholds it, and remain so even after its violent recloseting. In the final frenzy of his repression, Steve has probably killed his only gay friend; but given the sexual ambiguity of “murder” in the film, the homicide hardly de-homosexualizes him. The last shot insists that, however far he has removed himself from the scene, he will never remove its inscription from his pupils.
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Faced with this coolly furious fantasy of gays loving/killing each other and—as we contract their homosexuality through our vulnerably wide-open eyes—turning each of us into a gay lover/killer, too, one is almost tempted to say that, if the AIDS epidemic hadn’t happened, our culture would have had to invent it, as its exorbitant defense against the spill of gay sexual radicalism. Right after Cruising, in fact, the culture would proceed to do just that: invent AIDS, the “gay disease,” Nature’s rebuke to unnatural practices, God’s way of weeding his garden, and all the rest. The film’s banal paranoia would become horribly so. We must give the protestors this credit: before AIDS, they recognized the structure of AIDS panic.
Yet Cruising deserves a better queer analysis than they offered. To hear them go on, you’d have thought this “brutal arena” (as one of their flyers described it) was all Friedkin’s sinister devising, and not the marvelous pleasure quarters it was for so many gay men, much less the momentous counter-cultural project described by Foucault or Guy Hocquenghem, who proclaimed: “Our assholes are revolutionary!” And let’s be honest: would Martin Scorsese, with a mafia escort, have ever put on a jockstrap and descended into the Mine Shaft? Friedkin is openly as well as keenly curious about radical gay sexual practice, and, however much he may seek to protect himself or his viewers from its consequences, this curiosity visibly—ineffaceably—structures his film. The protesters’ disingenuous, sex-phobic public relations have led the way to the present deplorable state of affairs, where all mainstream gay male representation aspires to the flaccid edification of an After-School Special, and the only gay men with a right to speak on the New York Times OpEd page are married with children! No doubt, Cruising lays down the same paranoid postulate as the classic thriller: the homosexual will make us all homosexual. (Guy to Bruno in Strangers on a Train: “Now you’ve got me acting guilty.”) But the classic thriller also worked the paranoia through, via the death of the Homosexual, to the restored psychic health of its protagonist; in the end, it was as much of a marriage plot as As You Like It. But, signally failing to accomplish this achievement, Cruising instead shows that the paranoid defense against homosexual desire—albeit never before defended against more violently than here—can no longer be imagined with a successful outcome. This irresolution spoils the movie—spoils it, precisely, as a murder mystery. Responsible for the flaw, of course, is the background that refuses to stay in its designated marginal place. Having at long last seen this background, we can hardly avoid recognizing that we are all in it now, right up to our eyeballs.
