By Bus Station John
As a DJ who’s created a number of clubs celebrating the music, aesthetic and sexual freedom of the period during which Cruising was released, I’ve noticed that a significant number of the gay men in attendance — the twenty- and thirtysomethings in particular — seem excited and intrigued by the film’s reissue on DVD. And why shouldn’t they be?
The film offers today’s youth much more than just a fleeting glimpse of the now long-gone gay NYC sexual underground enjoyed by their elders. In fact, Cruising works best as a travelogue of pre-Disneyfied gay Manhattan, a celluloid tour of the city’s most notorious bars, back rooms and bushes, refreshingly populated by non-tweezery, pedicure-free, steroid-deficient and un-cyber-tainted denizens of the night. As the camera pans various tableaux of lusty men-on-the-make, the viewer finds himself literally cruising the screen…everybody’s lookin’ good!