How Gays Lost It at the Movies

Last spring, Cruising, a 1980 film about a serial killer who stalks the gay sex clubs of New York City, played before packed houses at San Francisco’s Roxie Cinema. Little controversy attended the week-long run at the city’s premier revival house. Although quiescence usually goes unnoticed, this non-event, in a community whose gay citizens know how to make themselves heard, deserves attention. It’s a marker in the ever-shifting and ever-contested terrain of gay self-identity.

When Cruising first came out, it was trashed as a horror flick in which gays were the monsters, a piece of ungenteel slumming by hateful Hollywood. Not only was it junk, gay activists argued, it was dangerous junk that t...