pantryslut | (no subject)

(no subject)

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."

Threaded | Flat

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.

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.

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

= = = = = = = = = =
http://www.nightcharm.com
Sophisticated smut for the smart gay man.
Executive Editor John Calendo mailto:editor@nightcharm.com
Publisher David K. mailto:master@nightcharm.com

Threaded | Flat