- #Movie scene gay men cruising straight guy in cafe serial
- #Movie scene gay men cruising straight guy in cafe series
Conversely, the leather scene neutralizes the police uniform by reappropriating it into a fetish – or exposing it as a fetish – as leather gays start to blend with the police, and the film proliferates with Pacino lookalikes. In the opening scene, the police are introduced as overtly misogynistic, homophobic and antisocial – these cops make Popeye Doyle look like a study in human rights – and as the motor engine of the closet as it operates across the city.
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#Movie scene gay men cruising straight guy in cafe series
While this metaphor is a bit cheesy, Friedkin also brokers it to introduce a horror element to some of the more procedural elements, starting with the first autopsy sequence, set against a series of abrasive sound effects and the ominous whir of Stryker Saws.Ībove and beyond these homophobic overtones, however, Friedkin brilliantly fuses police cruising and gay cruising, shooting most of his outdoor scenes with a cool blue filter that fades all outfits to a police palette, and evokes a city entirely surveilled by the gaze of the NYPD. Since the leather community was centred in the Meat Packing District, butchering motifs aren’t hard to come by – the first major lead involves checking a knife from a steak restaurant against bodies, and is followed by a tracking shot that follows the killer and his next victim as they walk along a series of meat hooks. To Friedkin’s credit, this moral outrage is pretty peremptory, and tends to revolve around the spectacle of human flesh, and the metaphor of gay nightlife as a flesh trade. Of course, there’s a homophobic elements to all this, even or especially as the characters nobly insist that leather community “doesn’t represent all gays,” which there are a few obligatory moments of moral panic at the depravity of casual gay sex. Certainly he has to plunge into the headt world of gay nightlife, resulting in a frank approach to sexuality across the film, which brims from corporeal configurations and fetishistic flourishes that feel drawn from adult cinema as much as classical Hollywood. Edelson chooses Burns because he has the “look” of the gay community and, while it’s never directly stated, implies that he needs to sleep with men to really understand the crime. So (supposedly) sequestered is this leather community that it’s not enough for Burns to conduct a normal investigation – he has to totally immerse himself in the community, and pass for gay as he rents an apartment near Christopher Street and quickly falls in with his next door neighbour, who also happens to be gay.
![movie scene gay men cruising straight guy in cafe movie scene gay men cruising straight guy in cafe](https://queerintheworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Gay-Eindhoven-Guide-The-Essential-Guide-To-Gay-Travel-In-Eindhoven-Netherlands-4-1024x768.jpg)
It’s a bit laughable that the NYPD would have cared too much about the fate of a gay hustler at time, so we have to suspend disbelief when Captain Edelson, played by Paul Sorvino, instructs Officer Steve Burns, to go undercover in order to figure out who is targeting the leather community, and arrest them.
#Movie scene gay men cruising straight guy in cafe serial
In essence, it’s a serial killer narrative, with the difference that this killer is operating within New York’s gay leather community, targeting hustlers in particular. It’s not hard to see why, since this was easily the most explicit mainstream film made about the gay community at this point in time, at least in American cinema, meaning that it really pushes the envelope in terms of some its content, but also inevitably falls into some homophobic tropes in the process, even if some of these seem fairly forgivable in retrospect.
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Cruising is perhaps William Friedkin’s most divisive film, gaining criticism from both sides of the political spectrum when it was released in 1980, on the cusp of the AIDS crisis.