Members of The Blue Max Motorcycle Club — Fernando, seated on the bike, and his husband — talk with a police officer. c. December 1969. Courtesy ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.
Pretty sure th’ fuzz is just congratulating the happy couple…
The Blue Max Motorcycle Club was founded in 1968 as an alternative to L.A.’s gay bar scene—where the LAPD often harassed, entrapped and arrested men—with annual “motorcycle runs” throughout California on various roads and campgrounds. By the late 1970s, 20 gay motorcycle clubs were formed, each with its own distinctive traits and themes. Each club had official and unofficial uniforms, insignias and colors. The Blue Max Motorcycle Club became known for its irreverent references to Kaiser Wilhelm II of Prussia and the Red Baron, and in 1969, the first annual Red Baron Run began. Frontiers’ Magazine, 7-20 August 2014
Christopher Street Magazine. September 1979. Page 9.
William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) was not warmly received by gay activists. He was already on their shitlist due to directing The Boys in the Band (1970), and they weren’t about to let him repeat the offense sitting down. The issue with both films was what Friedkin, as a metonym for the film industry in general, chose to prioritize in his representation of gays. With The Boys in the Band, it was the high-pathos, distinctly unliberated attitudes of its principal characters, and with Cruising, it was serial murders and leather bars.
Vito Russo’s Celluloid Closet gets at why people would object to the movie even during its filming. First there’s the source material:
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.
Then there are the circumstances of filming:
Yet he used the Greenwich Village ghetto and scores of gay extras… to make a film about a series of grisly murders patterned not on Walker’s book but on the killings of gay men that had been reported widely in the press in the late 1970s. Friedkin’s screenplay incorporated the locales and the modus operandi of several real-life Greenwich Village murders, and Friedkin consulted in prison with Paul Bateson, who was convicted of killing Variety critic Addison Verrill and had once had a bit part as a medic in Friedkin’s film The Exorcist.
These ripped-from-the-headlines details and real world settings then lend false verisimilitude to a bullshit story that imagines the gay demimonde as inherently violent. Or at least it would, if the movie were coherent enough to get its bad ideas across. The mini-documentaries that come with the film show that these ideas did inform the making of the film. In a featurette titled “Exorcising Cruising,” the actor who played one of the murderers, Richard Cox, says, “I think one of the things that Billy [William Friedkin] was saying is that there’s this X factor out there. That there’s a violent killer always lurking. It goes on. There’ll always be another.”
This and the indeterminate identity of the killer(s) is played up in the featurette as a spooky commentary on the human condition or a horror movie device to get you jumping at shadows when you’re back at home. It might have been, if the killers and victims had come from all segments of society. Instead, it targeted just one that happened to routinely be imagined as tragic, evil or both in the sparse representation it actually ever got.
Both films have since been reappraised and rehabilitated, but neither film was quickly or completely forgiven. In the May 25th, 1992 issue of Christopher Street, critic Bob Satuloff said that Cruising “has got to be the most homophobic movie ever made.”
But would you believe I had a mostly positive impression of the movie before writing it up? It’s only the source material, social context at the time of release, and stated intentions of the creators that are damning! You know, only those little things. The leather bar scenes are absolute catnip to me and likely most people reading this. The scene where Pacino, an undercover cop, visits a bar filled with writhing, eroticized simulacra of his co-workers is one of the most amazing moments in any gay-themed movie I’ve seen. The killer’s “You made me do that” catchphrase sounds in 2014 hilariously close to Urkel’s “Did I do that?” It now fits Susan Sontag’s formulation of camp: passionate, failed seriousness, rendered lovable by distance in time.
In the Advocate: “Full moon” parties were regularly held, as were events planned around a theme. Patrons were encouraged to bring costumes — from feathered masks to black leather uniforms — and a bowl of psychedelic punch was often set out. For a while there were life drawing classes, Tantric massage classes, and a weekly drop-in support group lead by a hip shrink. Members of these groups were encouraged by the offer of a free locker to spend the evening and this helped foster a more familiar and intimate atmosphere than was common in other gay bathhouses of the era. The sense of playfulness and camaraderie there was palpable. No more so than the night when the city’s reigning disco diva, Sylvester himself, came to party down.
Dug into the bedrock beneath the Fairoaks (below the sauna, glory holes, and sling), was the basement office and living quarters for some of the owners and staff. There were eight partners, including Melleno and his lover, Rob Mullis. Many of those men, like a great number of Fairoaks patrons, are no longer alive — taken by the plague of AIDS that would decimate the city’s gay population in just another few years.
Like a string of black pearls, San Francisco’s bathhouses adorned the city with a touch of louche glamour before they were officially closed in October 1984. The Houthouse, the Barracks, the Handball Express, Animals, the Club, Bulldog, Sutro, and, down by the tracks, the Ritch Street Baths. The ever-notorious South-of-the-Slot, and so many more. Each claimed a distinct character and clientele. But no place had quite the feeling of coming home once through the front door as did the Fairoaks.”
Note: Erotic screenplay describes an encounter between Leatherman and Stranger. Stranger fulfills his leather, bondage, sexual dominance and submission fantasy with experienced and confident Leatherman.
This is the one and only New York City Police Department mug shot as a result of the total of 21 arrests from the notorious 1969 Stonewall Rebellion in Greenwich Village, New York City… If one is familiar with the times of Gays and the police in New York City in the 1960s, the Stonewaller did not use his or her actual name. Because The Stonewall, owned and operated by the Mafia, had to be considered a ‘private club’ in order to control who entered, you were regarded as a ‘member’ and, therefore, had to ‘sign-in’. This Stonewaller shown above signed in as the junior namesake of an actress from Hollywood.Back on point with the unwritten Gay life two-point policy back then: do not bring any identification and do not use your real name! Therefore, with no ID on a Stonewall person and a clean record in the system for any name, there was literally nothing for the police to check and nothing to compare.
OMG AMG! I just noticed that the days of the week in 2014 are going to line up with those in my 1964 Athletic Model Guild calendar. I’m already a big fan of Bob Mizer‘s work, so expect to see more of this this throughout the year!
