Cruising through the years: These two films are reclaiming queer history & the great gay pastime
do we know what we know about the history of cruising?“Cruising is its own language, and it’s wordless, which is beautiful,” filmmaker Carmen Emmi says, whose arresting feature debut Plainclothes is one of two projects premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival that directly explores the art of cruising at different points in the past, along with the short film Sweetheart.While researching for his 1990s-set drama, the thirty-something Emmi turned to two primary sources: The first was a sampling of his queer elders—men who could share their first-hand experiences from their discreet hookups back in the day, recalling many of the subtle signifiers we still recognize, from the hanky code to the tell-tale nod.But his other source?
Court records. As long as there’s been cruising, there have been gay men arrested and detained for public indecency, engaging in lewd acts, or, for a long period of time, “sodomy”—which means much of our understanding of this great, gay pastime is still told through the lens of our oppressors.Despite that, Emmi recalls reading the striking details of one cruising arrest that occurred just over a decade ago in Long Beach, CA, where a local man fell victim to a police entrapment scheme: “That court document read like a movie,” he tells Queerty.Huh, a movie about cruising?
Now there’s an idea…Though a number of projects in more recent years have focused on or featured cruising (Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night & Eliza Hittman’s Beach Rats both come to mind as great examples), the most well-known film on the subject remains, fittingly, Cruising, William Friedkin’s 1980 crime thriller.A groundbreaking, ground-level view of NYC’s leather scene in the late ’70s, it follows a cop (Al Pacino) who goes deep undercover to track down a killer stalking gay men.
