William Friedkin’s 1980 film CRUISING was….. and still is … the most controversial queer film ever made. It’s about a series of violent New York murders in which the victims all frequent clandestine Manhattan nightclubs in which gay men gather to dance, drink, and make pairings while enveloped in an S&M atmosphere of leather, boots, whips, and chains. Clubs like that thrive in all the big cities, and their promise of danger is usually just atmosphere.

When Friedkin announced plans to set a movie in that milieu, and he drew inspiration from the brutal murder of Variety reporter Addison Verrill, blurring the boundaries between cinematic fiction and real-life tragedy. He chose to film it as much as possible on location, but the New York gay community immediately rose up in protest. “Cruising,” they said, would present a distorted view of gay life. It would imply the small subculture of S&M was more prevalent than it is, and that, if gays were “into” violence, attacks on them would somehow be justified.  When the film was released, it was attacked on all sides by movie critics, LGBTQ activists, and even the Motion Picture Association of America.

All the criticisms were aimed at the ambiguity of the film and its unclear social/sexual politics: was Cruising condemning or condoning the homosexual “lifestyle”? Was the leather scene depicted in the film symptomatic of the gay “agenda,” or was it an anomaly, an outlier for the mainstream gay movement? Were the murders portrayed in the film championing homophobia or critiquing and “outing” it?

Now the movie and its subject matter are the focus of a new film from multi-award-winning queer filmmaker Jeffrey Schwarz. In  Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders, Schwarz takes viewers down dark, sweaty gay clubs like the legendary Mineshaft, where leathermen pushed the boundaries of sexual expression in the 1970s.   It’s also where director William Friedkin went to party while he was researching for the film, one of many colorful details from behind the scenes. But even that’s only part of the story. Part elegy for a lost world and part tribute to the forgotten victim at the center of the case —  Addison Verrill, the journalist and film critic whose horrific 1977 murder inspired Friedkin to write Cruising — Mineshaft combines true crime and cinema history for a documentary that captures decades of gay life through the lens of a single film.

All will be revealed when the movie has its World Premiere at TRIBECA shortly, BUT Queerguru has always been big fans of Schwarz’s work, and so expect that maybe at last it will finally deal once and for all the negativity about Friedkin’s film