“Fortune and Men’s Eyes”Prison has always been gay. And you get the odd bonus of witnessing a young Steve Buscemi packaged as a rebellious almost-sex symbol.
This movie looks cheap now but it’s a fascinating time-capsule, full of ’80s ennui and irony. You just wanted to go there and soak up the low-rent Keith Haring T-shirted sophistication. It wouldn’t even scare you that AIDS was decimating everyone. “Parting Glances”If you were queer and living in some small town in the 1980s, you could rent this movie at the video store and indulge in the fantasy that you were really in New York with a complicated boyfriend and lots of bohemian pals in the Village and you’d be cool and grown-up and going out to see Ann Magnuson perform somewhere every night. It’s a wild party you wish would never end. Al Pacino dances, some biker/leather drag queens pop up, a giant African American cop wearing nothing but a jock strap beats Al senseless and, finally, Al turns into a leatherman just from having contact with other gays. From the opening credits of a severed gay arm floating in the Hudson River, you know you’re in for a good time. But time has been kind to “Cruising” and now it’s pretty much a comedy. It was hugely controversial at the time of its release because gay audiences were flat-out tired - when they were discussed in films at all - of always being portrayed as the bad guys. “Cruising”Al Pacino is an undercover cop on the trail of a killer in the gay S&M scene. So what follows is a too-brief, incomplete guide to homo-awesome… And I’ll take them over the 1990s and ’00s onslaught of bland, queerly caucasian romantic comedies any day.
I mean, yeah, all the characters in these movies lived lives of misery or were criminals or possibly insane, and most of them died by the final reel, but they did so in style. Once upon a time there were movies that made homosexuality look like the most excellently dangerous cool-kid party around. Exciting isn’t it? Yeah, I know, “gay” is boring already.