
“I don’t make a film because I’m against something. For that matter, I don’t make a film because I’m for something — don’t make propaganda. If anything, all the films I’ve made are enormously ambiguous.” William Friedkin, interview with Janet Maslin1
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Even before it was released, William Friedkin’s Cruising caused controversy. Loosely based on New York Times reporter Gerald Walker’s literary-journalistic novel concerning a serial killer preying on gay men in New York’s Greenwich Village, Friedkin’s film was attacked on all sides by movie critics, LGBTQ activists, and even the Motion Picture Association of America. What seemed to be at the heart of all the criticisms were the ambiguity of the film and its unclear social/sexual politics: was Cruising condemning or condoning the homosexual “lifestyle”? Was the leather scene depicted in the film symptomatic of the gay “agenda,” or was it an anomaly, an outlier for the mainstream gay movement? Were the murders portrayed in the film championing homophobia or critiquing and “outing” it? If we have learned nothing from Friedkin’s cinematic oeuvre, answers to these questions would not be easy to discern.
Friedkin’s Cruising drew from four sources. The first was Walker’s 1970 crime novel, which focuses on a series of murders occurring in the gay S/M and leather subcultures of New York City. In the novel, John Lynch, an undercover police officer takes on the persona of a homosexual man to enter into the gay community and hunt for the killer. The novel’s narrative is broken up into three perspectives: Lynch’s, the serial killer Stuart Richards’s, and Lynch’s police superior Captain Edelson’s. By splitting the story amongst three characters, the notion of a stable, objective, and coherent voice or identity for the reader to focus on is disrupted. The thoughts, attitudes, motivations, and actions of these three characters weave in and out of each other, forming a complex web of attraction, repulsion, anger, confusion, and fear. Friedkin would borrow this technique in his film adaptation, pushing the question of not only a cohesive identity but also a cohesive sexuality into uncomfortable areas. The director also utilized articles about a string of unsolved killings in gay leather bars in the early 1970s written by Village Voice journalist Arthur Bell, who would become a thorn in Friedkin’s side once filming of Cruising began. Friedkin personally interviewed Randy Jurgensen, a police officer who performed undercover work to investigate homosexual murders in New York City that occurred in the early 1960s. Jurgensen and his partner discovered that gay men were being victimized by two perpetrators who were posing as cops. Allegedly, Jurgensen become so invested in this undercover work that he began to question his own sexuality. Friedkin would incorporate this notion of false identities exchanging personas, examining one’s own erotic attractions, and the use of the image of a police officer to hide motives and exploit the power of and obedience to authority into Cruising.2
Friedkin also went to Riker’s Island to meet with Paul Bateson. Bateson, who portrayed a radiological technologist in Friedkin’s film The Exorcist, was convicted of the murder of film industry journalist Addison Verrill (supposedly a regular at the leather bar the Mineshaft, which would figure heavily in the mise-en-scene of Cruising) and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in prison. While he was awaiting trial, Bateson allegedly bragged to his fellow inmates, police, and the district attorney that he was the “Bag Murderer” who had killed and dismembered victims in a series of slayings of gay men. Unable to find corroborating evidence, the authorities did not charge Bateson with the murders, and they are still officially unsolved. Having a connection to Bateson as well as his claims of being a serial killer preying on men in New York’s leather subculture must have been too tempting for Friedkin to ignore.3 Depending on which interview with Friedkin you read, Bateson either confessed to the murders while talking with the director or was copping to the killings in order to get a plea deal and a shorter prison sentence. (More killings=less prison time? No wonder our justice system is so messed up.) Either way, Friedkin used the notion of an unbalanced perpetrator, who could not be definitively pinned down in terms of his culpability or his reasons for killing, to startlingly frustrating effect in Cruising.
Before Cruising was to be shot, someone leaked an early draft of the script to Arthur Bell. Bell had been friends with Addison Verrill and had actually helped police catch Paul Bateson. Horrified over what he perceived as exploiting Verrill’s death in particular and the homosexual movement in general, Bell waged a campaign against Friedkin and Cruising. Concerned that the film would only add to the already high percentage of violent crimes perpetrated on homosexuals in New York City (with most of the perpetrators still at large thanks to decades-long official disinterest in these hate crimes), Bell felt he had to do something to protect the LBGTQ+ community. Throughout the shooting of the film in the summer of 1979, gay activists protested the production of the movie. Bell asked protestors to disrupt filming and urged gay-owned businesses in Manhattan to ban the filmmakers from using their stores and bars as film locations. In a stimulating bit of serendipity, these same protestors inadvertently affected the filming of the Village People’s magnum opus, Nancy Walker’s phantasmagorical origin story of those singing macho man denizens of the YMCA entitled Can’t Stop the Music, a very different account of gay life in the late 1970s, which was filming in New York at the same time at some of the same locales as Cruising.
Protestors aimed mirrors from rooftops toward lighting rigs to ruin lighting for scenes, blew whistles and air horns during filming, and played loud music to drown out the director’s communication with actors and crew. A thousand activists walked through Greenwich Village demanding the city not support the film. How effective these disruptions were is debatable as the protestors underestimated Friedkin’s genius; he actually incorporated the distractions into the scenes As the film makes connections between police culture and S/M leather culture, the blowing of whistles blurs police whistles and disco whistles heard in nightspots at the time, and the shining lights could be either police searchlights or discothèque spotlights. As an olive branch to the gay community, Friedkin either chose or was forced to (again depending on which day you interviewed Friedkin) run a disclaimer before the film that read: “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.”
The fear and anger that Bell articulated for a part of the gay community had to do with the anxiety over losing the substantial inroads that positive, realistic depictions of homosexuality had made into late 1970s mainstream America. These constructive strides could be endangered by a film like Cruising. A film directed by an Academy Award-winning, world-renowned filmmaker, starring one of Hollywood’s biggest stars (Al Pacino) about a gay serial killer situated in the “freakish” world of S/M leather culture, an underground culture that practices a form of sexualized violence, had the potential to validate all the ignorant, hateful, and false stereotypes projected at homosexuals.4
Homophobia, misrepresentation, and threats to gay liberation were not the only criticisms aimed at Cruising. The film was accused of having structural problems; narrative gaps; baffling editing, weak, underdeveloped characters; and a perplexing, unsatisfying ending. In particular, the characters of undercover cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) and possible murderer Stuart Richards (Richard Cox) were singled out as examples of Friedkin’s awkward, inscrutable film. The lack of clear reasons behind their behaviors, the indecisiveness of their thinking, their contradictory actions, and the inability of either character to present a unified, rational identification and location of their personalities in their personal, professional, and sexual lives were all severely critiqued by film critics. These evaluations may be true, but Cruising is a film of fragmentation, multiplicity, and uncertainty, and so the two main characters are mirrored halves of a shattered whole. In the film, everything is inconclusive: guilt, innocence, experience, naivete, homosexuality, heterosexuality, cop, criminal, real, fantasy. This question of who one really is is echoed in the killer’s sing-song refrain of “Who’s here, I’m here, you’re here.” Psychological twins, Burns and Richards have no cohesive, consistent identity because there are no cohesive, consistent identities in the postmodern world of Cruising. Burns and Richards vacillate through binaries in all aspects of their lives, especially their sexual identities, preferences, and desires. If Cruising suggests that gender, sexuality, and identity are on spectrums rather than absolutes or binaries, Friedkin shows that these spectrums do not run straight and parallel but twist and turn, overlap and become knotted, disjointed, and recursive. The mystery of the film is not who is the killer (Friedkin purposefully has different actors play the murderer in different scenes to further bewilder the audience), but rather, who is Steve Burns?
The ending of the film suggests that there is no solution to this puzzle, just deeper mysteries that emerge like Russian stacking dolls. Friedkin brilliantly stages the ending with Burns first looking at himself in a mirror but then noticing his girlfriend Nancy’s image also reflected to him, dressed in his undercover disguise of a leather jacket, cap, and sunglasses. Nancy resembles Burns and Richards simultaneously, multiplying the possibilities of identity, sexuality, and culpability for murder. What was once hidden has been revealed, but even this revelation is refracted and enigmatic, as all personas are. Nancy can be Burns who can be Richards who can be Burns who can be Nancy who can be Richards and back again. The sounds of chains ring in our ears as the two worlds that Burns has lived in (handcuffs=police=heterosexual and fetish accoutrements=leather scene=homosexual) combine and blur just as Burns’s identities have. Reason and logic can only give us more discourse and rhetoric rather than any absolute, stable, and coherent truth, and so Cruising’s dénouement cannot give us the answers and explanation we feel we deserve from all mystery films.
The other major criticism of Cruising is that it vilifies S/M leather culture, presenting its members as monstrous perverts addicted to depraved violence and cruelty. Although Friedkin does attempt to portray the leather scene as realistically as possible (he had done his field research at a number of leather bars and hired many of their patrons as extras in the film), it is the police that are depicted as deceptive, hypocritical sadists who prey on a community that has little recourse to fight back. Cruising deconstructs the binaries of the worlds of cops and leather clubs and their inhabitants, starting with the title of the film. The term cruising invokes the multiplicity of meanings, symbols, and relationships in the film as it can refer to police cruisers patrolling the city as well as being slang for gay men looking to pick up potential dates and sexual hookups. These two meanings become intertwined in the film as a gay cop cruises transvestite prostitutes and gay men cruise an undercover cop, Steve Burns. Burns cruises in both meanings of the term as he is both cop and participant in the leather bars, which of course begs the question of where does cop cruising stop and leather bar cruising begin? Another character who indulges in dual cruising is Patrolman DiSimone (played by the wondrously oily Joe Spinell, below; if you were making a movie about the slimy underbelly of NYC in the late ’70s/early ’80s, you had to have Spinell involved in some way), a misogynistic, homophobic closeted cop who uses his badge and authority to prey on gay hookers (one of whom wears a hat that looks like a police cap) demanding sex for free. At one point in the film, DiSimone even cruises Burns in one of the leather bars. The dominant colors of the film are black and blue, not only the hue of the NYC police uniforms but also the tone of the police theme night at one of the bars as the denizens have to dress like cops to gain admittance. Ironically, Burns (a real cop) is not allowed in, having been spotted as inauthentic as both homosexual and pretend cop by an employee at the bar. Black and blue is, of course, a term that describes the discoloration that is indicative of the bruising of a wound as well as symbolizing violence, pain, and injury.
In Cruising, the police are shown to be overwhelmingly more aggressive than the participants in the S/M leather culture, assaulting, threatening, and torturing innocent victims who are forced to subjugate themselves to the power and authority of law enforcement. This hostility is much different than the fetishized violence practiced by two (or more) consenting adults for pleasure. The activities of the members of the S/M leather scenes are games that push sexual boundaries, but choice, permission and mutual enjoyment are at the core of their culture and actions. The scenes in the leather bars exemplify freedom and hedonism, not repression and misery: a Spartan male world of sweat, testosterone, leather, rubber, and skin. Participants dance, take drugs, have sex, or just talk without the fear of judgment, arrest, or disgusted reactions. The rampaging bloodshed and savage victimization in the film can be traced to characters who are overly self-restrained, corrupt, self-deceiving, self-hating, and abusive. The vicious anger of these self-loathing predators is projected onto their objects of repressed desire, blaming gay men for their own unfulfilled lives and yearnings, caring more about their reputations and self-image than the lives of their victims. Homophobia created these killers and offenders; it also allows them to get away with their crimes and thrive in an atmosphere of scapegoating and institutionalized hatred. The murderers and culprits in Cruising are not anomalies or freaks of nature or an isolated individual phenomenon, but rather, the collective products of a homophobic society that says gays are lesser than, not as important as, and inferior to heterosexuals, deserving to be hated and victimized. The real villains in Cruising are the hypocritical self-deniers who take out their lust, frustrations, and hopeless misanthropy on those who are secure with themselves and their pleasures.
In the midst of the controversies and condemnations, much of what made Cruising such a compelling film was lost in the shuffle. Friedkin creates an absolutely bleak, tangibly gritty late ’70s NYC aesthetic of porno theaters, no-tell hotels, forsaken streets, and the desolate anonymity of the Meat Packing District smeared over with the blaring tough guy nihilism of the Germs, Rough Trade, Willy Deville, Madelynn Von Ritz, and the Cripples.5 In the midst of acting as the musical director for the film, legendary record producer (and future husband of Buffy Saint-Marie) Jack Nitzsche was arrested for illegally entering the home of actress (and former Mrs. Neil Young) Carrie Snodgrass, beating her and sexually assaulting her with the barrel of a gun. Snodgrass suffered a bone fracture, cuts and bruises, and received 18 stitches. Callous onslaughts and sexual terrorism hung on Cruising like a dead albatross.
The final blow to Cruising came when the film was submitted to the MPAA for a rating. After screening it, the board gave the movie an X rating with the head of the MPAA Richard Heffner stating that “There aren’t enough XXXs in the alphabet to rate this movie.”6 (One wonders how Heffner would have reacted to viewing a Steven Toushin film or Roger Earl’s Born to Raise Hell.) Friedkin claims to have resubmitted the film 50 times and deleted some 40 minutes of footage. As usual with Friedkin, there are conflicting accounts of what exactly was contained in those excised scenes: the director has said that the footage was “pure graphic pornography”7 in order to distract the MPAA and get the cut he wanted passed, but he has also said that the footage contained information that made Burns’s transformation into a killer clearer and less ambiguous. But Friedkin got the last laugh, as he included subliminal flashes of anal sex during some of the murder scenes, giving the killings a definite sexual, phallic edge.
The question of what that footage really contained and how much narrative light it would have shed on Cruising remains, like most things connected to the film, a question mark. When Friedkin was preparing Cruising for a DVD release, he discovered that United Artists no longer had the deleted scenes and believes the company destroyed the footage out of either repulsion or carelessness. Cruising superfan and Hollywood wunderkind James Franco made a movie in 2013 called Interior. Leather Bar, which supposedly was to imagine what the lost footage would have entailed, yet the short film is more about why James Franco would want to make a film about the lost footage in the first place. Perhaps it is better that the deleted scenes haven’t been found, which only deepens the mystery of an already enigmatic film.8 Footage that would have made a more direct, comprehensible, linear narrative with clear motivations and unambiguous identities might have pleased critics and mainstream audiences but would not have served the postmodern themes of the film. Transgression isn’t about crossing from the permissible to the obscene but rather, about what can and can’t be represented and by whom. Critics such as Mark Kermode, Peyton Brock, Orrin Grey, and Kyle Turner have noted that far from being a homophobic movie denouncing a homosexual community, Cruising not only constructively complicates identity, and sexuality but also exposes how repression and misrepresentation can breed the fear, hatred, and violence that fuels the crimes that are so irrationally (and ambiguously) depicted in Cruising.
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P.S. I once ran into actor James Remar, who played Steve Burns’s next door neighbor’s volatile lover in Cruising. In our brief conversation, I mentioned that I thought Cruising was an underrated, misunderstood masterpiece. He looked at me for a second, started laughing, and walked away.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
- Janet Maslin, “Friedkin Defends His ‘Cruising,’” New York Times, September 18, 1979. https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/18/archives/friedkin-defends-his-cruising-struck-him-as-unusual.html [↩]
- In the early 1970s, there was talk of director Paul Morrissey adapting Cruising. Although Friedkin did an amazing job, the mind boggles at what a version utilizing the graphic documentary street-hustle camp style that Morrissey displayed in Flesh (1970), Trash (1970), and Women in Revolt (1971) would have looked like. Perhaps Morrissey’s aesthetics would have been a more authentic vision for bringing Walker’s novel to the screen? [↩]
- A possibly apocryphal story (and when it comes to Friedkin, anything he says has to be considered apocryphal) is that Friedkin did his own field research in NYC, going to S/M clubs and observing the nightlife wearing only a jockstrap. Following the fallout over Arthur Bell’s accusations, two of the clubs (the Mineshaft and the Eagle’s Nest) supposedly banned Friedkin from ever returning. Supposedly. [↩]
- It’s interesting to compare Cruising to another misunderstood, subversive exploration of homosexuality, violence, murder, and the questioning of identity: Fassbinder’s splendiferously surrealistic 1982 adaptation of Jean Genet’s novel Querelle. Cruising and Querelle were both dismissed by U.S film critics and pilloried by the gay press, perhaps because Friedkin and Fassbinder seemed to embrace the outsider, outlaw status of certain aspects of the homosexual community rather than try to water down elements of these subcultures to gain mainstream validation. [↩]
- Supposedly when Friedkin first heard the Germs’ contributions to the Cruising soundtrack, he started to pogo dance along with the furious beat. [↩]
- Thomas D. Clagett, William Friedkin: Films of Aberration, Obsession, and Reality. McFarland, 1990. [↩]
- Christopher Lane, William Friedkin: Interviews. University Press of Mississippi, 2020. [↩]
- The initial specs for Arrow Video’s 4K release of Cruising – release date February 25, 2025 – offer these titillating extras: deleted scenes and alternative footage; on-set audio featuring the club scenes and protest coverage; censored material reels. Will these long-rumored outtakes represent the Holy Grail for Cruising fans or will they be much ado about nothing? [↩]