Did gay men invent cancel culture? Even before it was filmed, William Friedkin’s gay serial-killer thriller Cruising (1980) attracted massive publicity and protests from gay writers in New York, who feared it depicted the gay men of the city’s leather bars as sex degenerates in a moment of rising homophobia and right-wing politics. In this episode, we talk about Christopher Street editor Charles Ortleb’s strange screed against the film, which also served as a political statement for the magazine’s desire for gay men to become a “people” with a collective identity.

We talk about how the controversy over a film now seen as a cult classic foreshadowed contemporary debates about representation and cultural appropriation, the long history of gay men analogizing homophobia to fascism and the Holocaust, and whether there’s a kind of identity politics that might be less dumb than what we experience on social media today.

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction

(07:29) The making of ‘Cruising’

(14:16) How ‘Cruising’ became a gay controversy

(18:34) Charles Ortleb’s importance in gay intellectual life

(24:21) The “zap” and 1970s gay media politics

(31:47) The gay fascism analogy and Holocaust comparisons

(42:11) Gay identity politics vs. liberal universalism

(50:09) Why Ortleb’s paranoia was better suited to AIDS

(57:58) Defenses of ‘Cruising were insane, too!

(01:04:01) Art doesn’t need permission from minority groups

Sources

Domenic DeSocio, “Christopher Street Hits Fifty,” Gay & Lesbian Review, May-June 2026.

Blake Smith, “In Defense of Cruising,” Air Mail, November 9, 2024.

Arthur Bell, “On Cruising: The Hollywood Hassle,” The Village Voice, September 3, 1979.

Charles Ortleb, “The Context of Cruising,” Christopher Street, April 1980.

Michael Denneny, introduction to The Christopher Street Reader (1983).

Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet (1996).

Janet Maslin, “William Friedkin Defends His Cruising,” New York Times, September 18, 1979.

Ramzi Fawaz, Queer Forms (2022).

Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street (1982).

Jonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990 (2025).

John Rechy, “A Case for Cruising,” The Village Voice, August 6, 1979.