Village Voice writer Arthur Bell was the person who raised a call for full out sabotage on the movie writing that 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. 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.” The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (back when they actually had a task) in a letter to the New York Times wrote 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. The film loosely based on the novel of the same name, by New York Times reporter Gerald Walker is about a rookie NYPD cop that goes undercover to bait a homophobic serial killer in the gay leather and S&M world of New York’s Greenwich Village. But other than the negative aspects the movie itself is a time capsule of a life and places long gone in NYC in the late 70’s and early 1980’s. A few days ago on another social media platform I made a post about the 1980 movie “Cruising” directed by Willam Fredkin and starring Al Pacino and the impact that it made upon the LGBT community.
