Chapter 6 Queerness Underground: the Abject, the Normal, and Pleasure in Cruising and Interior.Leather Bar

Jon Braddy and Billy Huff

1 Introduction

On August 20, 1979, eight hundred protestors marched to a film site for Wil- liam Friedkin’s Cruising, a film about a cop, Steve Burns (Al Pacino), who goes undercover in New York’s gay leather clubs to investigate the serial murders of a number of gay patrons.1 The protestors, mainly members of New York’s ‘gay community’, wanted nothing less than to stop the filming. Despite numerous protests and boycotts, Cruising was released in theatres on February 15, 1980 after Friedkin removed forty minutes of leather bar footage from the film in order to garner an ‘R’ rating. The film, along with various reactions to its rep- resentations of gay life, stands as a memorial to the contradictions that have always characterised the project for gay liberation. In Cruising’s historical moment, the radical strategies of post-​Stonewall gay activism were giving way to a more conservative gay . The move- ment itself was recovering from the catalytic rupture of Anita Bryant’s ‘’ campaign, a campaign that began in Dade County Florida to advocate support of rescinding ordinances that prohibited against gay people.2 Gay activists fought hard battles against the social stigma of and damaging representations of gay men and women. The mainstream gay response to social ills was a characteristic defensive response that particularly focused attention to the ambiguities and complications of gay representation. The years after the release of Cruising were marked by many changes re- garding the rights, representations and lives of those who identified as gay or

1 Scott Turner, ‘Sex, Death and Free Speech: The Fight to Stop Friedkin’s Cruising’, The Body Politic 58 (1979): 23. 2 James Darsey, ‘From Gay Is Good to the Scourge of AIDS: The Evolution of Gay Liberation Rhetoric, 1977–1990’,​ in Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, eds. Charles E. Morris and Stephen H. Browne (State College: Strata Publishing Company, 2006), 490. Darsey provides a detailed analysis of the rhetorical constraints and opportunities of gay liberation rhetoric during this period, including the themes that dominated.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004382299_008 102 Braddy and Huff lesbian. The eighties was a conservative decade that included the presidency of and the rise of right-​wing evangelicalism. The era was frac- tured, however, by the emergence of the aids virus and the bigotry that was expressed through government and media responses to the crisis. Mainstream gay activism changed form to meet the demands of a life and death struggle against the stigma of a disease that does not care about the identity of the vic- tim. Queer activism and ultimately queer theory resulted in some ways from necessity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. aids and queer activists were forced to confront the exclusionary limits of identity politics. Similarly, the shift in the humanities to poststructuralist accounts of reality forced academics to ques- tion assumptions about sex, gender, sexuality and bodies. The nineties witnessed a drastic rise in mainstream representations of gay life in the media. A number of popular television shows and movies included gay characters and focused on gay themes. With the exception of several cat- alytic events (‘something that arises outside the bounds of movement strate- gy but that shapes the subsequent discourse of the movement’),3 such as the murder of Matthew Shepard, the project of mainstream gay liberation was again dominated by discourses of normalisation. The first decade of the new millennium followed the trajectory of the prior decade. It seems now that the fights for equal rights for gays to serve in the military, adopt children and marry are won. In 2013, actor James Franco and filmmaker Travis Mathews embarked on a project to recreate the forty lost minutes of footage Friedkin was required to remove from Cruising in order to make it acceptable for a public audience. Franco and Mathews begin Interior.Leather Bar discussing the problematic na- ture of Cruising as a problem of representation.4 How does one represent gay? Given that so much has changed for gay men and lesbians since 1980, Franco and Mathews make clear that they are attempting to recreate the footage from Cruising in a way more amenable to a different reality and a different politics. While the viewer might expect the film to mirror the lost footage, the film is ac- tually a docu-fiction​ that focuses more on the construction of the image than it does on the image itself. Leaving aside questions of whether Franco and Mathews were successful in creating an alternative to Cruising that contained less ‘offensive’ represen- tations of gay men, we focus our interest on the two films, Cruising and Interi- or.Leather Bar, to argue that they each confront the social order with its own

3 Ibid., 500. 4 Interior.Leather Bar, dir. Travis Mathews and James Franco, Burbank: Rabbit Bandini Produc- tions, 2014. dvd.