51: Cruising (with Kaycee Felton-Lui)

For our second installment of Queer & Rotten, we're heading back to 1980 to dissect one of the most controversial movies of the last 40 years: William Friedkin's queer-panic serial killer thriller "Cruising," featuring one of last truly restrained Al Pacino performances. A film that was mired in controversy from the moment it was announced, Friedkin's film became the first studio-funded thriller to set its sights on the queer S&M community. Protests from the New York queer community throughout its filming and up to its theatrical release paved the way for decades of polarizing conversations and retrospectives surrounding the film, as it remains a cinematic curiosity to this day. We're joined by writer Kaycee Felton-Lui to discuss the films place in the queer canon in 2021, Pacino and Friedkin's contentious working relationship, the complicated legacy the film left behind, and its haunting reminder of the homophobia that permeated Hollywood and the rest of the world at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic. "Cruising" is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.