Cruising Bresani

The film Cruising (William Friedkin, 1980) opens up an interesting dialogue with our readings this week, as well as the required sex ads on Craiglist, “looking for things,” as Diego put it. In the film, Frank Burns (Al Pacino) goes undercover in the New York S&M scene of late 70’s (pre AIDS) to catch a serial killer who has been preying on gay men. The victims, explains the police captain while detailing the operation to Burns, “were not in the mainstream of gay life. They were into heavy leather, S&M, a world unto itself.” Burns is sent out into the hedonistic scene as bait, to “cruise” the killer, as he matches the physical descriptions of the victims. Perhaps problematically, the film equates the act of cruising, or searching for an anonymous, casual sexual partner, with a radical underworld of leather, whips, public sex, and secret bars. The whole movie is available here, on Youtube, if you want to check it out (scroll through this guy's uploads, the film is there, broken into 14 segments). I highly recommend renting it though; it is one of my favorite films, despite stirring tons of controversy during its production and release for portraying gay men as wild, uninhibited, and dangerous.

Although more of the differences and comparisons between the film and our readings/homework can be drawn out at another time (perhaps in class if anyone else has seen the film), I thought Burns’ descent/ascent into this world was particularly relevant to the new ethics Bresani assigns to cruising. Quoting Foucault, Bresani discusses an asceticism of a homosexuality to come, “in other words, not in the sense of a morality of renunciation but as an exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, an to attain a certain mode of being” (20). This mode of ethics, as Bresani notes, contrasts to the typical queer response to the hetero-moral condemnation of cruising, S&M, and public sex, which has historically been to suggest that these practices are novel and/or claim that they are perfectly within the realms of decency. Yet asserting the civility of these acts for Bresani means implicitly accepting “homophobic morality” values and striking the potentiality of cruising as new dynamic of sociability. Bresani believes that cruising can become a dismissal of moral worthiness itself, creating a new group of people who evade archaic moral categories all together. In short, cruising demands a new set of ethics, an asceticism of the self where the self is left behind to a radical otherness, a mutual surrendering to otherness, a “moment we relate to that which transcends all relations” (22). Combining this “jouissance of otherness” with an ascetic, rather than masochistic (S&M) erasure of inter-subjectivity, leads to a new mutuality in sex and society, where the desire for the other’s desire is feasibly eradicated. This fascinating reading of an ethics to come definitely mirrors Deleuze’s transcendental empiricism which also attempted to free thought and humans from the constraints of transcendence and its results: judgment, clichés, common opinion, failures of thinking, etc.

It’s a stretch, but perhaps we can see Bresani in Burns from Cruising. I won’t spoil the film entirely, but as Burns gets deeper into his new mode of life, his identity begins to unravel, or perhaps Burns begin to view his life, his identity, as already unraveled, fractured, and unexplainable. His experiences expose a new ethics, a new group of people, gathering in the park at night, shirking all of the homophobic morality weighing down the rest of the city (notably, all of the characters in the film that are “proper” heterosexuals, Burn’s lieutenant, the other cops, etc., are enslaved to the red tape of their jobs and wear it on their leaden faces). The killer is re-inscribing this morality on the “cruisers,” a morality that Burns himself must uphold if he is to catch the killer, one that he has known all his life and will not know “appropriately” again.