Abstract
On August 20, 1979, eight hundred protestors marched to a film site for William Friedkin’s Cruising, a film about a cop, Steve Burns (Al Pacino), who goes undercover in New York’s gay leather clubs to investigate the serial murders of a number of gay patrons.1 The protestors, mainly members of New York’s ‘gay community’, wanted nothing less than to stop the filming. Despite numerous protests and boycotts, Cruising was released in theatres on February 15, 1980 after Friedkin removed forty minutes of leather bar footage from the film in order to garner an ‘R’ rating. The film, along with various reactions to its representations of gay life, stands as a memorial to the contradictions that have always characterised the project for gay liberation.