Legacy of a Divisive Movie

Arguably no major gay-themed film has ever been as polarizing within the queer community as 1980’s Cruising, the gritty William Friedkin crime thriller set against the backdrop of New York’s leather-bar scene. Documentarian Jeffrey Schwarz takes a three-pronged approach to the subject in Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders, examining the real-life homicide that inspired the story, the development and filming on New York locations, and the controversies that dogged the shoot, with massive protest crowds of LGBTQ rights activists disrupting production and rattling the star, Al Pacino.

Schwarz has an excellent track record as a chronicler of queer pop culture — the Hollywood hunk both pre- and post-coming out in Tab Hunter Confidential; John Waters’ muse in I Am Divine; gay activist and scholar Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet, the definitive study of queer representation in movies, in Vito; and Wrangler: Anatomy of an Icon, a portrait of gay porn hall-of-famer Jack Wrangler. That’s just to name a few.

The lore around Cruising proves somewhat harder to distill, making the new film discursive, its focus shifting throughout in ways that are not always fluid. Schwarz (also serving as editor) is careful to contextualize Friedkin’s thriller in a time when gay men rarely saw themselves portrayed by Hollywood with any kind of complexity. That no doubt heightened sensitivities, causing gay activist groups to speculate that depicting the allure of danger and violence within the S&M subculture of the 1970s might provoke homophobic hate crimes.

Another area deemed problematic was the ambiguity of the film’s ending, over which questions linger about the effect on Pacino’s character, undercover cop Steve Burns, of being immersed in the world of hardcore, sexually aggressive leathermen for a prolonged period. Had he developed same-sex urges? Was he himself a killer? Just the veiled suggestion that exposure to the underground gay scene might somehow make it contagious rankled many, notable among them Russo and openly gay Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell. 

A “mole” on the production was believed to have leaked the script to Bell, who began publishing columns urging readers to protest what he wrote “promises to be the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen.” Some who were present remember that movement as an extraordinary coming together of the entire queer community — “A party” for some, “a battleground” for Friedkin, his cast and crew.

While Cruising has become less of a hot potato over the decades, particularly once a much fuller spectrum of queer representation became available, it remains an uneasy blip on the timeline of LGBTQ cinema. 

Friedkin maintained that it was never intended to represent the entire “homosexual world,” just one small subculture, which fits with what an observer notes is the director’s interest in closed societies — the police, the priesthood, the gay fetish scene. “I’m just making a thriller that’s not meant to oppress anybody,” he says here, seeming to think gay men should be grateful for the visibility.

But disclaimers aside, queer people back then were so unused to seeing themselves in three-dimensional screen depictions that the very fact of Cruising being one of the first gay films to target mainstream audiences — Friedkin had The French Connection and The Exorcist under his belt, Pacino had done The Godfather and its first sequel, Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon — inevitably meant it would be interpreted to some degree as an indictment of homosexuality. 

Gay rights had only just begun to make headway with visibility, acceptance and social standing, so this return to an older narrative — one that confirmed all the worst prejudices of sordid homosexual depravity — was seen as a step backwards. For many of us, the poorly reviewed Cruising was just not a great movie, creepy, but at times borderline ridiculous and riddled with inauthentic dialogue. The assertion of some queer pundits that it has since been re-evaluated as a gay classic seems spurious and Schwarz fails to mount much of a persuasive case for that reassessment.

Friedkin, who died in 2023 and is seen only in archival interviews, now seems disingenuous in some of his denials that the film was exploitative, especially with regard to the murder that inspired it. (Pacino distanced himself from the movie even before its release, refusing to do press.)

The director read about the killing of Addison Verrill, a 36-year-old film reporter and reviewer for Variety, in a Voice column by Bell. Friedkin never approached Bell or the victim’s family while developing the script. Former entertainment lawyer Bob Geary, who had been romantically involved with Verrill, still appears traumatized that a filmmaker would feed off his former partner’s tragedy for entertainment. Geary’s interview snippets are among the doc’s most emotionally resonant moments, along with those of the victim’s sister, Pamela Verrill Walker.

One of the more startling nuggets the doc reveals concerns Paul Bateson, the former radiological technician convicted of Verrill’s murder. They had met the night before at West Village leather bar the Mineshaft. According to Bateson’s account, they went home to Verrill’s apartment and had sex that he felt was nonreciprocal. Since the journalist had fulfilled neither his physical nor emotional needs, Bateson killed him on impulse the following morning while he was still sleeping, banging him over the head with a cast iron frying pan and then stabbing him. 

In an uncanny coincidence, Bateson had played a small role as an assistant in an NYU medical center scene in The Exorcist five years earlier. 

Friedkin was also intrigued by Bateson becoming the sole suspect in what were known as “The Bag Murders,” in which dismembered bodies, seemingly cut up by someone with medical experience, were fished out of the Hudson River in trash bags. The victims remained unidentifiable, through remnants of their clothing indicated they were gay men from the leather scene. Bateson boasted of his responsibility while awaiting trial, but lack of hard evidence meant he was never charged with those crimes.

Schwarz has gathered a surplus of fascinating information, sharply packaged as always and accompanied by a period-evocative synthwave score by Makeup and Vanity Set (Nashville-based musician Matthew Steven Pusti). But a binding point of view remains frustratingly elusive, suggesting the material might have been better served by a three-part limited series. The tripartite focus — real-life murders, movie, protests at the time vs. how it’s viewed today — feels disjointed. At a little under 90 minutes, the film also feels cramped.

Nonetheless, for anyone interested in queer history, both social and pop-cultural, there’s a lot here to chew on. Just the extent to which Friedkin and former undercover cop Randy Jurgensen, who served as an advisor, immersed themselves in the gay fetish milieu while developing the project makes for juicy insights. 

Friedkin says they even followed the dress code for theme nights at the Mineshaft, though he claims he was seldom bothered by sexual advances: “I was just another fat Jew in a jockstrap.” The fact that the director was casting porn actors and leather daddies and the location (a reconstruction of the Mineshaft in a different club) was serving shots and drugs feeds into the idea that Friedkin was going for a heightened, more sexually charged reality that might be read as sensationalistic.

Ultimately, the film’s biggest takeaway dovetails with the way in which Cruising is viewed at almost five decades’ distance. It’s a window, however skewed, into the hedonistic party of post-Stonewall sexual freedom before the terror of the AIDS crisis struck and shut everything down; a time when hookups started with eye contact rather than apps, when New York City was jumping with leather bars — the Anvil, Badlands, Sneakers — not to mention the sexual playground of the Meatpacking District (“the Trucks”) and West Side piers. As such, Friedkin’s film has taken on a social-history aspect that dilutes its toxicity.