2024 Film Diary: Cruising

Cruising/William Friedkin/1980. Seen on DCP at the Cinematheque Francaise

Though it made it to the margins of both my book on Al Pacino and the 1980/American Gigolo episode of Erotic 80s, I’ve never written about this film at length. Maybe because I don’t feel fully equipped to assess the arguments against it in terms of homophobia. Cruising, like Basic Instinct more than a decade later, was protested as it was being made by members of the gay community who feared that the completed film would feel exploitative, and/or perpetuate damaging stereotypes that queerness was a mental illness that was bound to drive the afflicted to murder. I do not know if queer people today feel that these arguments hold up. I would like to find out, but I fear there is not a lot of new thought circulating on this film. I recently listened to a major podcast on which Cruising was mentioned by the two queer millennial speakers, who took the circa-1979 protests at face value/as enough evidence to slam the film as homophobic; it didn’t seem like either of these speakers had actually seen the movie. In fact, they spoke as though not seeing this movie was an act of righteousness.