Gay Old Time

villagevoice.com/2007/08/28/gay-old-time

Film

by Nathan Lee
August 28, 2007

Al Pacino cruises his inner gay Warner Bros.

Entertainment

In the 1960s, a New York City patrolman

named Randy Jurgensen was assigned to
investigate the harassment of gay men by a
shakedown crew known as Salt and Pepper.
Claiming to be cops, the duo (one white, one
black, thus the nickname) prowled the piers
and pickup spots of the far West Village,
“busting” guys caught busting a nut and
demanding payoff. Jurgensen went deep
undercover in hopes of provoking an
encounter. Setting up in a Village apartment,
he donned the uniform of the leather scene and studied its rituals, making nightly forays to the
decadent bars clustered at the terminus of Christopher Street.

So Jurgensen recounts his stint as a downtown daddy on the upcoming DVD debut of
Cruising, William Friedkin’s notorious thriller starring Al Pacino as a NYPD cop deranged—
sexually and otherwise—by his contact with the hardcore gay underground. Currently being
rehabilitated by a theatrical re-release in advance of the DVD, Cruising‘s seedy ambience and
dubious sexual politics inflamed the gay community, leading to protests throughout its filming in
the summer of 1979, and continuing outside movie theaters when it opened in February of
1980. Despite the notoriety and marquee star, Friedkin’s downbeat, ambivalent, and
flamboyantly pervy fag noir was a critical and box-office disappointment.

On the DVD “making of” supplement, Jurgensen, who served as a consultant on Cruising
(among other films, including Friedkin’s The French Connection), testifies to its accuracy of
detail, going so far as to vouch for the historical veracity of its most improbable and infamous
flourish: the bizarre entrance of a giant black police officer into a tense interrogation room

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where, wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and jockstrap, he bitch-slaps a cowering suspect.
We’ll have to take Jurgensen’s word for it, though he’s not the only source for the movie’s
salacious scenario.

Friedkin derived the title and basic premise from a 1970 novel by Gerald Walker, a former
editor at The New York Times Magazine. It’s unclear whether or not Walker was aware of
Jurgensen’s operation, but the plot of his book is strikingly similar: A rookie NYPD cop goes
undercover to bait a homophobic serial killer. Friedkin departs from Walker in manners large
(shifting the point of view entirely to the cop) and small (changing his name from John Lynch to
Steve Burns) while retaining details as specific as the subject of the killer’s Columbia
University thesis (the roots of the classic American musical—so gay! so evil!).

Reviews and reporting on Cruising at the time noted the discrepancies between book and film,
but none mentioned Jurgensen by name. It’s almost as if his autobiographical input was later
used as a PR strategy to legitimize the controversial nature of the project and defend it against
the charge of homophobia. It needed all the help it could get.

Throughout the summer of 1979, a large and vocal segment of New York’s gay community
rallied to protest the production of a movie that seemed to equate— yet again—homosexuality
with criminal insanity. In his July 16 column, Village Voice writer Arthur Bell raised a call for
sabotage. Friedkin’s film “promises to be the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at
homosexuality ever presented on the screen,” he wrote, “the worst possible nightmare of the
most uptight straight. I implore readers . . . to give Friedkin and his production crew a terrible
time if you spot them in your neighborhoods.”

Readers obliged. They took to Village rooftops, pointing mirrors at the shoot to interfere with
the lighting, and surrounded the set blasting whistles and air horns. The most resourceful
found out which apartments Friedkin would be using and set up in adjacent units to blast
stereos. Evidence of this disruption is immortalized on the Cruising soundtrack, much of which
has obviously been dubbed in the safety of post-production. Bell further exhorted gay business
owners to “tell Friedkin to fuck off when he comes around to film and exploit,” and enough did
so on Christopher Street to thwart any location shooting in the heart of the gay ghetto.

A few weeks after Bell’s broadside appeared (“What the Declaration of Independence was to
Jefferson, that column was to the gay community,” he would later boast to Janet Maslin), The
New York Times described the march of a thousand protesters through the Village, “most of
them men and most of them clad in jeans or shorts and T-shirts.” Responding to demands that
the city withdraw support for the film, Mayor (and famous closet case) Ed Koch was quoted as
saying, “Whether it is a group that seeks to make the gay life exciting or to make it negative,
it’s not our job to look into that.”

The dust (glitter?) had settled by September, and the Times ran a sympathetic profile of
Friedkin. The National Gay Task Force took offense, writing a letter to the editor insisting that
“in the context of an anti-homosexual society, a film about violent, sex-obsessed gay men
would be seen as a film about all gay people.”

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The psychosexual dynamic of Cruising is certainly questionable—deliberately so, to some
extent—though in chalking up violent homoerotic impulses to unresolved daddy issues, the
movie may be a greater insult to the intelligence of psychoanalysts than to the sensibilities of
gays. From today’s vantage point, it seems unlikely that any audience for Cruising would
automatically equate the hardcore leather scene depicted in the film with gay culture at large,
though it pays to remember that this was an era when Time magazine, reporting on the
Cruising controversy, could blithely inform its readership that “homosexual homicides are
frequent—and often gruesome; dismembered corpses . . . and mutilated genitals are
common.”

Still, it’s hard not to detect another source of anxiety underlying the protests: the
squeamishness of the assimilation set over a movie that flaunts the decadent, disreputable
antics of their Dionysian brothers. Cruising is a mediocre thriller but an amazing time capsule
—a heady, horny flashback to the last gasp of full-blown sexual abandon, and easily the most
graphic depiction of gay sex ever seen in a mainstream movie. Filmed in such legendary bars
as the Ramrod, Anvil, Mine Shaft, and Eagle’s Nest (the latter two eventually barred Friedkin
from the premises), Cruising is a lurid fever dream of popper fumes, color-coded pocket
hankies, hardcore disco frottage, and Crisco-coated forearms. Nowadays, when the naughtiest
thing you can do in a New York gay club is light a cigarette, it’s bracing—and, let’s admit, pretty
fucking hot— to travel back to a moment when getting your ass plowed in public was as blasé
as ordering a Red Bull.

Elaborating on the infernal urban horror show of Taxi Driver, Friedkin imagines the entire West
Side of Manhattan as an expanse of sticky asphalt swarming with tumescent Honcho sluts.
Grotesquerie abounds—leering sex fiends, freaky bondage weirdos, fugly trannies—but so
does a palpable sense of fun. Nothing at the orgy is as shocking as the smile on everyone’s
face. This atmosphere of uninhibited sexual camaraderie—invisible to the protesters and long
since vanished from the scene—overpowers the trite homophobic conceits. Cruising‘s lasting
legacy isn’t political but archival. One year after the film was released, the first symptoms of
AIDS were detected in New York City.

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