My first encounter with Cruising was as a 13-year-old in suburban Queens, watching a special episode about gay films on Siskel & Ebert’s Sneak Previews. The clips they showed of a dark and violent gay world disturbed me deeply, but I couldn’t look away. I didn’t have the language to understand why the film both terrified and fascinated me, but those images burned into my memory.

When I came out in the early 1990s, I discovered Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet and devoured his history of LGBTQ+ representation on screen. I set out to watch every film he discussed, hungry to understand my own community’s complicated relationship with Hollywood. Russo described Cruising as a film where “the monster is homosexuality itself.” Gay men were portrayed as both predators and prey, feeding into dangerous stereotypes at a time when the community was fighting for survival.

When I finally saw Cruising, I understood why it had sparked such fury. Released in 1980, in the wake of Harvey Milk’s assassination, and as gay men were being murdered in the streets, Friedkin’s film felt like a betrayal. Yet Cruising also captured something real. It was filmed on our streets, in our bars, and featured many of the men who inhabited the late 1970s gay world. It was a document of a moment that would soon be erased by AIDS and gentrification.

Throughout my career as a filmmaker, I’ve been drawn to stories about the collision of entertainment and activism, so the backstory of Cruising fascinated me. I wanted to tell the story of its turbulent production and the fierce protests it inspired. In the summer of 1979, thousands of protesters took to the streets, disrupting production and demanding Hollywood stop exploiting our lives. For them, this wasn’t just about one film — it was about survival.

But as I researched the production, I discovered something that had been almost entirely forgotten — the real murders that inspired Friedkin’s film. In 1977, Addison Verrill, a rising young entertainment journalist, went home with someone he met at the Mineshaft, a notorious leather bar. During the night, he was murdered in his own bed. His murder, along with a series of unsolved “bag murders,” became the foundation for William Friedkin’s thriller.

Finding Addison’s partner Bob and his sister Pamela took some detective work, and when I finally reached them, they were understandably hesitant. They’d spent years seeing Addison reduced to a footnote in true crime history, defined only by the way he died. Their decision to participate in the film was motivated by a desire to reclaim his story and show who he really was — a talented, ambitious young man who loved film and was carving out a life for himself in New York. Someone who deserved to be remembered for how he lived, not just how he was killed.

For years, Cruising was a notorious “bad object,” reviled as one of the most harmful films ever made about us. But in recent years, it has undergone a critical reevaluation, with a new generation embracing it as a rare document of a vanished world decimated by AIDS. Many of the men visible on screen would be dead within a decade. Underground bars like the Mineshaft were shuttered. And the entire area where the scene once thrived has been so thoroughly gentrified that almost no trace remains of what existed there.

Yet as the film’s reputation has been reconsidered, the real stories behind it have receded into the background. This film is my attempt to bring them back into focus and to reckon with a chapter of our history that deserves to be remembered.

— Jeffrey Schwarz