(no subject)

[pantryslut]

Nightcharm has a great take on the film Cruising, soon to be released on DVD. (Nightcharm is NSFW.)

"I think what was really bugging the politically correct windbags was not what was fictional but what was accurate about the movie."

Comments

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that nightcharm misses much of the point entirely.

First off, attacking "politically correct windbags" 30 years after the fact is boring and easy and anyone who says "politically correct", especially when looking back in time, is suspect.

What was going on with the protests, it seems to me, was the fear of subculture going public. Some subculture survives purely because it is below the radar of the mainstream, or at least that's how it feels. Whatever the director's intentions, this movie was meant to make money for people not connected to the subculture it was based in, at the potential damage to that subculture. That's called exploitation.

Now, exploitation has unintended consequences sometimes. I agree that "Cruising" (which I haven't seen for a decade) is a brilliant disaster, shining a light on a scene that wouldn't be portrayed the same way today. It's fun. It is even, intentionally or unintentionally, hot at times and certainly became fantasy fodder for many folks.

But is a crossroads movie, made at a time when Gay Liberation had brought a subculture enough into the public eye that a major movie could be made to exploit it. At times of subcultural crossroads there are always political fights. In retrospect they may be silly-seeming. But think about what was at stake at the time and it's hard to feel like either side didn't had bad intentions.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I was too young for the original round of protests to register. But I do remember ten or so years later, Cruising still being referred to as a dreadful slander upon the gay community -- and very specifically, that it equated promiscuous cruisers with serial killers.

And then I saw it, and, um, no.

And I think that Nightcharm's piece does actually nail why that disconnect occurred.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

I have no issue with his take on the movie. I think that the view of history, by his use of "politically correct windbags" is reductionist and does a disservice to the times.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Ah! I understand. Yes.

[jactitation.livejournal.com]

Damn, you beat me to it! Absolutely.

I was a politically active dyke in 1980, and that divide he posits between politicos and sexually active people is a real strawman, only applicable to a very small part of "the movement" (as loose then as now, if bigger).

Lots of political leatherfolk were appalled at the movie because it was clearly not going to be anything like the leatherscene they knew, because no one in the leatherscene was gonna make a penny off it (but, instead, would get the clampdown), and because, yes, this was the only representation of gay leathersex and it was obviously intended as a morality tale. (Albeit with a twist: if a cop gets down with "scum," he comes to see some of their humanity and becomes compromised.)

Yes, I protested initially because I thought it was bad press. But in doing so, I came to know lots of leatherfolk who were also protesting and came to a much more complicated analysis--one that seems to have evaporated over time (and certainly in this revisionist history).

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I completely understand the p.o.v. of those who protested at the time, before the movie was released. There was no reason *not* to believe it wasn't going to equate gay S/M folks with serial killers, after all. (Plus the exploitation angle, which remains valid.)

But it didn't do that. Nonetheless, that was still the discourse around the movie that I encountered, over a decade later. Nothing about exploitation, all about gays = sex-crazed serial killers. And that was weird, and disorienting, and ultimately suspicious.

I think we may be having a clash of histories here, honestly. It makes me wonder now what generation the Nightcharm author is...

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

one could posit that it didn't do it because their were huge public protests about that movie every step of the way. That's not my view exactly, but the decision to publically oppose the exploitation of a culture has a ripple effect. The movie, in the end, certainly also ended up giving a media and public forum to the politically organized voices of the gay rights movement. These things are hard to measure.

I think my biggest criticism of the sex pos community in general is the revisionist sex vs. "politically correct"/swingers vs. activists /natural vs. political false dichotomies that sometimes get set up. This article is an example of that.

Nightcharm says they are of the '70s generation in the article.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I think my biggest criticism of the sex pos community in general is the revisionist sex vs. "politically correct"/swingers vs. activists /natural vs. political false dichotomies that sometimes get set up. This article is an example of that.

Lord knows I also have my struggles with this, yes.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

So if Nightcharm is of the '70s generation, then I would expect that Nightcharm lived through, and was affected by, that key event in the polarization between the sex-positives and the politicos, the closing of the baths. That fight ended friendships: One pair of friends never spoke to each other again, until one of them died. Another friend still calls the author of ...And the Band Played On "Randy Shits" even today. And, by and large, it was the politicals who were caught up in the moral panic to close the baths.

I haven't seen Cruising. My gay Maoist friends of the time would have sent me to a re-education camp if I had seeen it when it came out. But times have changed since then. One of the notable things about the film for today's audience is that it is a document of a millieu that is now lost forever. In 1980 it was exploitation. Today it would be a wistful memory, to go along with the wistful memories inspired by Peter Berlin movies.

So sure there is a lot of oversimplification in "politically correct windbags." There's one heck of a lot of pain and loss and grief that shapes that oversimplification.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Which isn't to say that your point about exploitation and potential damage to a certain subculture isn't entirely valid.

But I must say that it was never my impression that the *actual members of that subculture* -- i.e., casual cruising and leather bars -- were the ones making the complaint against the movie.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

The subculture I was referring to was "the gays" in general.

[mckennl.livejournal.com]

Well, I was living and working in NYC at the time and the problem to me was that there weren't any *other* representations of gay people in the media. It's like why I objected to the trans character on L-Word. It's not that there aren't FtMs who do all those things, who have rage and act like assholes and are hot at the same time, it's that Max was THE ONLY TRANS CHARACTER IN THE MASS MEDIA. This was the ONLY movie with gay men in it, period.

I mean now it's easy to watch Basic Instinct and be like, yeah, she's bi, so what. But at the time, if you wanted to see a bisexual female character in a movie, the blonde psycho killer was your only option.

I'm certain that it represented what it was really like for a lot of gay men in NYC. But it just hurt that it was the only mainstream image. The. Only. One. It's hard to imagine a time like that, but 1980 was that time. I don't even think Elton John was out of the closet yet.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

CATHARINE DID IT! hahaha.

[gordonzola.livejournal.com]

I can't believe I misspelled "Catherine" in all caps. ouch.

[jactitation.livejournal.com]

I think also that this article simply goes to the other side of that swing on the representation issue--that the movie is good simply because it has representations of gay leathersex that aren't available in any other format. I mean, I totally see your point (and it was, intitially, my point too when I was protesting--both during shooting and upon release), but eventually the representation argument seems to suggest that viewers are essentially passive and a bit stupid, and probably neither of us think that.

On the other hand, while I thought Basic Instinct was just a big dull, it was kind of cool to imagine that this movie could make all potential lovers treat me well because, y'now, I might have a big knife under the bed if they didn't act right. ;-)

[mckennl.livejournal.com]

Well, I think the viewers at the time weren't very well-informed about what it meant to be gay and they didn't have very many -- if any -- other resources to help them. So they didn't have to be passive or stupid to get, at the very least, a slanted impression from the film. It's like if there is only ONE MOVIE about lesbians and it's Monster. I loved that movie but I don't know how I would have felt if it was most people's first look at lesbians.

Cruising

[(Anonymous)]

Hi everyone,

This is John Calendo, the author of the Cruising piece and I am enjoying the nuanced discussion here about it, and the movie itself. Yes, many of the criticisms are compelling. Nevertheless, I stand by what I wrote and the way I saw things then, and do now.

As for my generation, I'll be 60 next year, so I was in my early 30's when the film came out. I remember well the Cruising protesters. From what I could tell, they were incredibly doctrinaire and humorless and took everything literally.

A lot of these folks showed up later in ACT UP, which I also joined. And damn, if they weren't always the people griping about "points of order" and Roberts Rules and whether or not this or that was slighting women or blacks or PWA's. Every such offense was unfailingly described as a "rape" -- thankfully in that big auditorium at Cooper Union I never had to worry about giggling too loudly in my seat.

So yeah, I had my fill of what years later would have the name "political correctness." That term was in use, by the way, on the left in the late 70's, which used it as something positive to aspire toward. I remember getting letters about how politically correct I was or wasn't when I edited a now-culty gay porn mag in L.A called In Touch.

As some of the comments on your site report, there was much fretting over whether gay people were making money from the movie -- which knowing a bit about movies, and the large proportion of gay people employed in movies, at all levels, is, as worries go, a tad toothless. But, just on it's face, how realistic is that expectation? Did the Amish make money from Witness? Do all those cheery Wiccans, dancing in the moonlight, ever seen a penny from the Harry Potter series?

I do realize now that the term "politically correct windbags" was unnecessarily offensive. And I should have found a way to say the same thing with less bile.

Thanks to all who took the time to read the piece and comment on it. I've enjoyed the discussion. You know, we're all in the same struggle, just coming at it from different directions.

John

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Sophisticated smut for the smart gay man.
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