Why straight liberals and many gays dislike this movie?

People get offended easily and I don't view this movie as a portrayal of all gays or think this movie was about the gay lifestyle at all, like Friedken said, the leather bars were a backdrop for a murder mystery, but people choose to see it as a commentary on gay lifestyles. Obviously this takes place in a subculture of the gay community, b/c there were actual murders going on in the leather bars in NYC and cops did what Burns did and went undercover, it wasn't sending a "message" that if you're gay you will be killed or become a killer, that's not what the movie was about, that was just a way to demonize it IMO.

Y'know, I could eat a peach for hours

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Cruising depicted gay and bisexual men as predatory vampires. That is why people got upset.

You have to go back to that time. Pop culture depicted gay people in only one way back then, as deviants, considering people were fighting for the right just to be able to be gay and not get fired from their job or not get the *beep* beaten out of them I can see why people had issues.

Now we have had a cross section of depictions of gay men and women, so this film doesn't seem so bad, but in 1980 many audiences would not have known anyone who was gay (as plenty were in the closet more so than today) so the only reference they would have had would have been movies like this. Gay men were trying to fight against always being seen as sex crazed maniacs, plus the book is apparently more bigoted than the movie from what I have heard.

I think if depictions of gay men had been more well rounded back in 1980, no one would have been so upset about it. Through the 80's and even up to Silence of the Lambs most movies always showed gay men as psycho killers or deviants, plus Cruising wasn't the only target in 1980. The movie Windows was another one that got lambasted, because surprise, surprise it had a lesbian character who was crazy and stalking a woman.

Gay community wanted to have a 'clean look' to enter the mainstream politics.

So they burn every bridge that can link them to a less than perfect image.

As an exemple: in 1980, there was still some official connections between The LGBT and the NAMBLA (heritage of the sexual revolution), it took years to get rid of it.

Not because Gays were pedophiles, but because some main actors of the sexual revlutions (leaders, intellectual) saw it as 'benign' or 'natural' (yes...)

Hays, Ginsberg, and many others... It was very much trendy in leftist ideology of this time.

For this film, the problem was the inner violence of the gay community. It's a taboo theme.

Even nowadays, it's very difficult to speak about violence between gays. The stats of domestic violence are the same as heterosexual violence.

Have you seen any major campaign about it ?

Plus, there's the serial killer problem. An absolut repellent for clean shaven perfect gay politician.

Jefrey Dammer, John Gacy, Nanzram, Nielsen, Gohl...

The film is quite good actually. It's too bad it has a bad rep. But of course homophobes won't like it, and mainstream PC gays seems uneasy about it.

It's interesting about the portrait of gay males over the decades. Thru the '70s and '80s, whenever there was the rare gay character in a movie or TV show, they were shown as outrageously stereotypic, pathetic, or the portrait pretented to be positive but was really pandering.

After everybody started falling out of the closet en masse in the '90s, and TV series have become full of gay characters, they are either physically-idealized GQ porn studs, or their sexuality absurdly exaggerated cartoonishly as in QUEER IS FOLK, or caught up in mismatched relationship (like in MODERN FAMILY).

All of which is de-sexualizing, making it difficult to picture them as real guys with real sexual lives with other guys, and it's therefore more 'comfortable'. So they give you the politics of visibility, but no relationships which feel at all organic, so it's safe.

In the DVD commentary by the late, great Anthony Minghella to his film THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY, he observes during the essentially-chaste bathtub scene between Matt Damon and Jude Law that had the scene been between a man and a woman (or even two women, for that matter) that viewers would have asked "where's the sex?" but that between to testosterone-fueled men, even a glance at a naked butt just seems to scream from the scene.

Even hints of male homosexual longing is too potentially erotic, so it has to be obscured or indirect in some way, or politicized in a manner which may be seen as 'relevant' but has little to do with real carnality.

So we have subjectively different standards for different things which really aren't that different at all.

While it is true that the leather-bar S&M scene had become a big part of the gay underground in the late-'70s (and the same era seemed the height of the serial sex slayer trend as well, for some reason, the period nestled between the end of Vietnam and before the neocon/AIDS era) it's quite understandable that gay folks resented this predatory portrait of gay as sexual vampires when there was so little representation of homosexuality in mainstream cinema. So there was a huge backlash.

Something similar happened a few years earlier when POLICE WOMAN with Angie Dickinson did an episode where three homicidal lesbians were knocking off residents of a retirement home for their checks, based on a real life incident. Obviously, if these were nice lesbians, there would be no crime to investigate, and this is a crime series after all. And if the killers were hetero, no one would associate their sexuality with their murder spree. But because there was so very little reflection of homosexuality on screen at that time (and what there was was degrading) this TV episode was seen as "hateful" despite the writer insisting the message wasn't homophobic.

When CRUISING came out, a lot of gay people hated the portrayal. There was so little else in movies to point to which was gay-but-harmless (unless it was a limp-wristed cliche). But there was no "normal" presentation.

By the 21st century, however, with the changes in the culture both on the street and in film, gay folks had earned the right to be just as pathological and dysfunctional as their hetero brethren. So, today, CRUISING comes off as what it always really was: a late-'70s urban period piece, both brilliant and brilliantly-flawed. And so the creepy lust-slicer angle doesn't really bother anybody much nowadays unless they're still viewing it thru the lens of 1979/80 politically.



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Why? Watch this doc: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112651/