Cruising

Gerald Walker – 1970 

While not a bestseller, Cruising caused a bit of a sensation by being so relentlessly lurid and one of the earliest exposes of the gay subculture in New York City. Though written before the Stonewall riots, it depicts both closeted and uncloseted gay men actively pursuing their sexual needs despite the dangers inherent in the practice of “cruising,” picking up, or being picked up by, random strangers. My interest in the book came from the fact that it was the foundation for not one but two great movies released in 1980, Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill and William Friedkin’s Cruising, the latter of which was freely adapted from the novel. De Palma had developed the project before Friedkin, having been impressed with the book, but after he lost the rights to it, he modified some of its themes and details into a new story, which became Dressed to Kill. The novel is a parallel narrative about a college student (Stuart Richards) who brutally murders gay men out of a thinly veiled rage against his own latent homosexual feelings, and a rookie policeman (John Lynch) who is assigned to go undercover in the gay “community” to draw out the killer. Lynch has been chosen because he resembles the victims and is deemed the killer’s “type.” He is hopelessly backwards and simple is his thinking on homosexuality, women and racial minorities, and is in many ways just as irrationally homophobic as Richards and many of the cops who routinely harass and beat up gays. The book’s numberless chapters go back and forth between Lynch’s and Richards’ stories as they gradually converge. Lynch’s visceral repulsion at the thought of sex between two men is mirrored by Richards’ contempt for the succession of women he sleeps with, with varying success, as he tries to force the homosexual impulses out of his psyche. The two young men resemble each other so much that Lynch is actually mistaken for Richards by a bullying cop who encounters them separately a day apart in the same vicinity. (This is a potent element missing from Friedkin’s film due to a miscast Al Pacino, at least 15 years too old for the lead role, although he was admirably brave to do so.) As far as I can discover, Cruising was Walker’s only published novel. He was a writer and editor with the New York Times Magazine for several decades. The book is not great literature by any means, but it’s not a mere potboiler either. The sometimes cliché psychological ideas ultimately give way to genuine suspense and a startlingly downbeat and foreboding conclusion.