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CRUISING Reviews

CRUISING Review by Wayne M. Malin "Preppy" (Malden MA)

A very disturbed college student (Stuart Richards) prowls the street of NY at night and viciously kills and mutilates gay men. Captain Edelson of the NYPD sets up a plot to send decoy cops out posing as gay men to trap the killer. John Lynch is chosen as one of the men to do it--even though he's against it. The book is narrated from the perspectives of these three men.

I've seen the film multiple times and find it disturbing yet powerful. The book is similar to the film in some respects but is MUCH more disturbing. Barely a page goes by without some racist or sexist remark coming up and there are TONS of homophobic slurs. This book is full of anger, hatred and self-loathing--there's never a let-up. The book is short (not even 200 pages) but it still is hard to get through. Also the ending seems ridiculously rushed considering what you have to read to get to it. As a totally out gay man I wasn't as offended by the comments in this book as I suppose I should be. EVERYbody comes under fire in this--no one is spared. Also, for 1970, this WAS the way gays were seen. I can't really recommend it--it's far too bleak with not one redeeming character in it. However, if you've seen the movie you might want to read it to see how the movie changed some things...for better or for worse.

CRUISING Review by Julie M. Vognar "Julie" (Berkeley, California United States)

SOME SPOILERS:
There are 13 murders in the book, and one self-defense killing, all but one of homosexuals, and, probably, all committed by homosexuals, twisted and conflicted beyond recognition, even by themselves. The self-defense killing is done by the desk-man at a bath house, who is trying to protect himself, and the surviving patrons of the bath house from a madman who has already killed six of the patrons--on his watch. Including this one, the killings are all committed by three men, eleven by one alone.

Two reviews by two experts, a psychological and factual summary of the plot, and a short reaction, which was used as a blurb inside the first few pages:

" William Friedkin's "Cruising" (1980) was based on a 1970 novel by Gerald Walker, a New York Times editor (actually the cultural editor of The New York Times Magazine--JMV) , Gerald Walker, that portrayed the process by which a New York City policemen, assigned to capture a psychotic killer of gay men, becomes aware of his own homosexuality, and commences murdering gays. The novel, while exploiting the socially instilled self-hatred of an unstable character, is homophobic in spirit and in fact; it sees all its gay characters as having been 'recruited,' condemned to the sad, gay life like modern vampires who must create new victims in order to survive (according to one kind of vampire legend--others treat vampire killing as a necessity, the creating of a new vampire as a sort of sexy work of art...yes---JMV). The gay characters in the novel are all filled with self-hatred and a hatred for the people who "turned" them gay (the blame usually falls on the first man with whom they had sex). Walker's killer (s--JMV) intimate that the homosexual lifestyle is an inherently violent one--not that the cruising scene is violent, but that to be homosexual is to be violent."
--Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet,1987, 1981

"Brilliant and, sadly, unforgettable...One of America's most persistent sexual nightmares."
--Gore Vidal

Russo's book, 368 pages long, covers more than three hundred films which portray homosexuals, in all imaginable ways-- between 1895-1987. That's a lot of films! Naturally, he made a few factual errors---all the gay men in the book are not violent. The cop's housemate and the madman's housemate are both intelligent and sympatico. In fact, there are only two really violent men in the book--told mainly from their points of view. But though other gay men make non-violent appearances, one feels a kind of strong, slender rope of hemp leading directly from the conflicted homosexuality of the two--to their violence. So yes--the reader gets the creepy feeling that if you knew you were gay when you were 4, or 10, or 16, you might be O.K, but if you find it out later, or never realize it at ALL, and hate gays anyway (or because of it)--you're likely to be a mad killer. It should also be said, playing the devil's advocate for Walker, that in 1970, although most scientists and many gay men knew that their minority sexual orientation was a natural one, there was as yet no genetic proof, (as there is now), that at least some of them owe it to their genes....like green eyes. So, technically, Walker was free to imagine any cause (I guess...). But what Russo says, in my opinion, is basically correct. The book is full of hatred, of self and of 'the others,' (the gays) as a German filmmaker put it in the 1920s, and to fill the reader of Cruising with a lot of mistrust of anything gay.

Vidal calls the book "brilliant", and, I am sorry to say, it is much better than a good read (and those last two pages, that another reviewer found either confusing, or disliked for some other reason, make the hair on the back of your neck stand up). It is, as Vidal says, a "nightmare." And, as he also says: "unforgettable." (I am very partial to Vidal.)

"Ever try to kick it?" the policeman asks his housemate, as if he were addicted to heroin.
*

"I'm homosexual... How and why are idle questions. It's a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green."-Jean Genet, 1910-1986

CRUISING Review by Roland (Idaho)

This book is good proof that gay people are really weird and do strange things like murder. Where I live in Kansas we all know that the gays are evil. This book was proof too of that I thought. I'm going to go fishing now and forget those weird people in N.Y.

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