'Cruising' for Another Bruising

There's no question that Cruising nails the look of the era — the sweat, the black leather and red bandannas, the long sideburns and plushly hairy chests — right down to the last pair of mirrored aviator shades. (If you doubt me, go cross-check it against the more lucid documentary Gay Sex in the '70s.) The movie's milieu, at least, was something real, even if Pacino, looking every one of his 39 years in an unfortunate scoop-necked black sleeveless T-shirt and a mutating perm that's as frightening as anything in the script, seems wildly uncomfortable as a cop meant to be a hot piece of sexbait in his late twenties. In a very intelligent and spirited semi-defense of the movie in The Village Voice, Nathan Lee finds something to cheer in what he calls the ''archival'' honesty of the visuals, as well as what he sees as the ''atmosphere of uninhibited sexual cameraderie'' and ''palpable sense of fun'' depicted in the clubs. (The fun looks more palpable to him than it does to me, but this is something about which gay moviegoers can reasonably differ.)

Lee also doubts that anyone viewing the movie in 1980 would ''automatically equate'' the world of the film with ''gay culture at large.'' Fair enough, but in that case, count me among the duped: In 1980, I was a years-from-coming-out 16-year-old growing up in New York City, and Cruising scared the crap out of me. In fairness to Cruising, it wasn't conceived in order to make me comfortable; in fairness to me, there wasn't exactly a multiplex full of gay-friendly options back then. It's easy to forget that ''gay culture at large'' wasn't so large in the pre-cable, pre-indie, pre-Ellen/Rosie/Will/Grace era — Cruising's window on gay life couldn't be easily contextualized by most moviegoers, because available context was so scant. It would be two years until Hollywood's next extended glimpse of homosexuals, Making Love, which is, in a way, the polite, progressive Jekyll to Cruising's raw Hyde (the two movies are poles apart, but they both treat man-on-man sex with a kind of fearsomely hushed solemnity).

One of the documentaries on the new DVD is titled ''Exorcising Cruising,'' the idea presumably being that if the movie could just be purged of the toxicity of its initial reception, its virtues might emerge. But the devil in Cruising is in the details of the film itself, not in the justifiable complaints about it. Cruising's second gasp of life can't help but call to mind the thousands of gay men who protested the film — not a single one of whom, remarkably, is allowed to speak for himself on the DVD. (One of the grass-roots leaders of the protests, Ethan Geto, is now Hillary Clinton's senior policy adviser on LGBT issues.)

I'll grudgingly celebrate the movie's return to visibility, since it represents the flashpoint at which gay people learned to fight homophobic stereotypes in pop culture with everything in their arsenal — to be out, loud, proud, pissed-off, and media-savvy. If the film, now frozen in its historical moment, scarcely seems worth the anger it generated, that's only because we've come a long way, not because anybody judging the movie got it wrong the first time. The Cruising protesters were not anti-First Amendment fascists, nor were they (as some younger gay moviegoers might imagine) sex-phobic prudes who wanted to hush up anything that might make us look bad to straight folks. They were fighters — and some were also non-fighters who suddenly discovered the fighter within. Cruising's technical adviser Sonny Grosso claims, somewhat incredibly, that he had ''never seen…ferociousness'' like that expressed by the film's picketers (really? This from the NYPD detective on whose life The French Connection was based?) If that's true, bravo to the haters. Over the decade that followed, that ferocity ended up mattering far more than anything in Cruising. ''What you've done in New York,'' a Paramount executive told the late journalist Arthur Bell, who helped to spur the protests, ''is raise consciousness.'' That's worth commemorating, even if Cruising isn't.