William Friedkin’s crime thriller Cruising opened on February 15, 1980, with Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, and Karen Allen. It is adapted from a novel by New York Times reporter Gerald Walker. The title cuts two ways: patrol cars cruise a neighborhood, and men cruise for sex. The story sits in late-1970s New York leather and S&M bar culture, and follows a cop sent into the West Village underground after a serial killer. Shot and sold while gay-rights protest was loud, the film was fought over at the time. Leather historians, queer-film scholars, and cult viewers still treat it as a text that matters.
A hot summer, an undercover cop
The plot runs through a sweltering New York summer. Male body parts keep coming out of the Hudson. Police tie the killings to pickups in West Village leather bars — Eagle’s Nest, Ramrod, Cock Pit — and to cheap rooms where the victims are bound and stabbed. Captain Edelson assigns Officer Steve Burns, slim and dark-haired, built like the dead men, to go undercover. Burns rents near the Meatpacking District and gets to know his neighbor, Ted Bailey, a gay playwright who is not getting anywhere. The job breaks Burns’s relationship with his girlfriend Nancy, because he cannot explain the work, while his tie to Ted warms up at night. Ted’s boyfriend Gregory, a jealous dancer, is the reason police later treat a killing as a lovers’ quarrel.
The undercover work turns ugly fast. Waiter Skip Lee is beaten through a police interrogation until fingerprints clear him. A Columbia University lead points to music graduate student Stuart Richards, who has schizophrenia. Burns cruises him in Morningside Park, asks him to drop his pants, and is attacked. Burns stabs back and arrests him. The prints match one crime scene. Soon Ted is found mutilated, and the police go after Gregory. Promoted to detective, Burns moves back in with Nancy. In the bathroom he shaves. She tries on his leather jacket, cap, and aviator sunglasses — the killer’s silhouette — and he stares into the mirror. The film never says whether Richards was the only killer, or whether Burns has killed, or what the undercover job has turned him into.
How the film got made
Producer Philip D’Antoni first handed Friedkin Walker’s 1970 novel. Friedkin passed. Steven Spielberg showed interest and nothing came of it. Years later Jerry Weintraub picked the project up. Friedkin came back to it because of real, unsolved leather-bar murders and Village Voice reporting by Arthur Bell. Consultant Randy Jurgensen had done Pacino-style deep cover on earlier gay murders. Paul Bateson, a doctor’s assistant who appeared in Friedkin’s The Exorcist, was implicated in several leather-bar killings but was not charged in those cases; he was prosecuted for a different murder. Friedkin also used Mafia contacts who then owned many gay bars. He wanted Richard Gere. Pacino got the part.
To fake the room, the production dressed Hellfire Club sets as a stand-in for the Mineshaft and hired Mineshaft regulars as extras. Pacino went to the real club to do the homework. The MPAA gave the film an X. Friedkin said he made about fifty trips to the board, spent fifty thousand dollars, and cut about forty minutes, mostly graphic club sex, including shots of Pacino watching and possibly taking part, before the rating dropped to R. Some obscured sex stayed in, and a few frames of gay porn still cut into the film. Pacino and Friedkin do not agree on the ending. Pacino has said that to this day he does not know whether the ending means Burns is the killer, newly gay, or both.
Protest noise and the reviews
In the summer of 1979, protesters led by Arthur Bell flashed mirrors from rooftops and blew whistles. About a thousand people marched through the East Village and disrupted the shoot, so some sound had to be looped later. After the 1980 release, the first reviews were mostly hostile. Gay activists condemned the film for tying gay desire to violence. Roger Ebert thought it was suspenseful and still failed to make clear how Burns stands toward S&M, which is the actual subject. Rotten Tomatoes sits near 50 percent. Critics pointed at holes in motive and at exploitation; others credited the craft and Pacino’s performance. Raymond Murray’s gay-film encyclopedia later read it as a Hollywood glimpse of sexual excess before AIDS. Friedkin later said the film used S&M as background for a murder mystery, that it arrived as gay liberation collided with the naming of AIDS, and that it should be judged as cinema rather than as an anti-gay tract. He also granted that the critics of the time were right: it was not the movement’s best first step.
Violence off the screen, and what was left on disc
The violence did not stay inside the frame. On November 19, 1980, former transit officer Ronald K. Crumpley opened fire with an Uzi near the Ramrod, killing two people and wounding others while ranting about killing gays. He was found not responsible by reason of mental disease and died in an institution in 2015. Some secondary sources tie the attack to the film. Contemporary New York Times coverage, and a 2016 revisit after the Pulse shooting, did not name Friedkin or Cruising. In Sydney in 1981, the unsolved stabbing murder of Gerald Cuthbert — more than sixty wounds — was linked in the press to sailors who had allegedly been shown the film. Police could not confirm that. On home video, Warner’s 2007–2008 deluxe DVD puts back some material that had not been seen. Arrow followed with a 2019 Blu-ray and a 2025 4K. James Franco and Travis Mathews’s Interior. Leather Bar. (2013) uses docufiction to chase the lost forty minutes. It does not reshoot them.
For leather and BDSM viewers, Cruising is both a record and a distortion. Hollywood borrowed the look of a real subculture, cut the sex that gave those rooms their meaning, added a legalistic disclaimer, and was still read as an indictment of the community. What remains is cult status, a stack of academic argument, and an open question about undercover cop Steve Burns: how far he has gone into that world, and what he has become there.
