During the 1970s and 1980s, gay men appeared in movies almost exclusively as limp-wristed hairdressers and drag queens with murderous split personalities.
Cruising, 1980, promised something different: gay men with apartments, jobs, and hangouts; and who were masculine, actually super-macho, with muscles, club bulges, and leather chaps.
Sounds like fun, right? Wrong.
The tv promo said only that Al Pacino would play a cop who "disappears into the darkness," and the theatrical trail showed him putting on makeup, plus men dancing together, and brief flashes of the words "homosexual," "violence," "murder," "fear," and "sex").
The movie wasn't playing in Rock Island, so one cold Saturday my boyfriend Fred and I drove an hour west to the college town of Iowa City to see our first gay movie, ever.
The plot: in sleazy, decadent gay bar, a "homosexual" played by Arnaldo Santana cruises a mysterious stranger. After discussing what turned them gay, they go home together, where the stranger politely asks the "homosexual," to lie still while he stabs him to death. Santana complies!
During the 1970s, criminologists often theorized about why gay men would pick up total strangers for sex. Some said that they were unable to control their "deviant" sexual desires, and others, that they were looking for a quick, easy way to destroy society by "wasting their seed" instead of making a baby. But most said that they felt so guilty over being gay that they wanted to be murdered.
More bar pickups, more murders. There's a gay serial killer out there "targeting his own!" Police detective Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is asked to go undercover and catch him.
So he moves into a sleazy apartment in the bad part of town, puts on a leather vest, applies makeup, and goes cruising.
He befriends his next door neighbor (Don Scardino), but runs afoul of Ted's effeminate, histrionic dancer-boyfriend (James Remar).
Occasionally Steve sees his girlfriend, but he becomes less and less interested in her as he is infected by the "gay lifestyle."
More sin, degradation, and dicks after the break
