Cruising: Of Faggots and Free Speech By Joe Uris I t ’s noon on Christopher Street in the Village and there is this muscular young man hailing a taxi in the winter sun. He has on a blue denim wrangler shirt, black leather hat, vest, gloves, boots and chaps. I f you pass behind him, as he curses a fast-cruising off- duty taxi, you will see that his pants are torn and all o f his tight ass is flashing whitely in the bright cold golden light. In the movies, local color does well in the suburbs and queers are coming out of closets everywhere. Men, it turns out do have these curious memories, desires and well — awareness of this gay aspect. So. not even talking for the moment about women, there is this interest both in the gay life and. of course, in the more bizarre areas of human sexual and display behavior. Low-cut gowns, nasty tight asses waiting for big long disgusting or rough leather belts. That sort of thing. And people are willing to pay to see this stuff, if it's made exciting and, or course, violent enough. But there is this tradition in the movie world which dates back officially to the Hayes office, (the old Hollywood self censuring agency), that requires all sinful action to have bad consequences. In the old days, this meant women who did “ it” before marriage became pregnant and alone. Nowadays the official censure is gone hut traditions of that era live on. Today it means that naughty little fruits.get killed by even badder creeps. Movie maker. William Friedkin, who. with such evily repressive and twisted films as The Exorcist, and Hoys in The Band, has long shown a pension for finding the pot of gold at the end of the morbid rainbow , now is making a film exploiting gay stereotypes, using both violence and “ just’’ and terrifying punishment. The movie, Cruising, starring Al Pacino, is being shot on location in the heart of the gay West Village. There are four brutal murders in the first fifteen minutes of the film. This has not made the gay community happy. There have been published ads urging the city of New York not to give site location control and other customary support to the movie because it perpetuates bad gay stereotypes and may encourage violence against homosexuals. The gays rightly question whether the city would allow an anti-black movie to be shot in Harlem, or an anti-Semitic one in Jewish Forest Hills. There has also been some civil disobedience and a riot or two. In response to ali the gay rage, the Executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Dorothy J. Samuels, has made an able civil libertarian response about tolerating unpopular or bad ideas and things. Samuels acknowledges the validity of gay outrage but councils against government involvement in deciding which film projects should and should not get city aid. Years ago Ray Bradbury made up a story about a Mexican Peasant who objected to the potential for lies and theft of identity involved in shooting fashion ads with his village as an exotic backdrop . B radbury’s charac ter stopped the filming by dropping his draws each time shooting started. Maybe freedom of expression is the tactic and naked reality literally the solution. Artistic freedom, of course means nothing when the enormous sums of money spent on promoting and making big time films is considered. The fact is that it is an injustice of great proportion that the old Hayes office morality of sexual activity equalling sin and sin requiring earthly punishment is perpetuated by men like Friedkin to their immense personal benefit. But then again, making harmful products is not just an American tradition: it is, despite all sorts of recognition and regulation, an accepted right, not unlike freedom of speech. 23
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