Cruising: What We’re Doing Is Affecting Us with guest Max Fox

This week we discussed Cruising, William Friedkin's highly controversial 1980 film starring Al Pacino as a cop who goes undercover to catch a serial killer who's targeting gay men in the underground subculture of S&M and leather bars of New York City.

Joining us this week to help us think about this confusing, confused, and fascinating film is writer, editor and translator Max Fox. We talk about attempts to sabotage the production of the film in the summer of '79 by gay protestors, the ways this film has been re-considered more recently, as well as James Franco's weird 2013 "docufilm" re-imagining footage of explicit sex scenes that Friedkin cut in order to acquire an R-rating from the MPAA.

Spoilers: werewolves, sexual paranoia, all method actors are undercover cops, Madeline's Pacino impression, "rich texts."

Max is part of the editorial collective for Pinko Magazine, edited Chris Chitty's posthumous book Sexual Hegemony with Duke University Press, and translated Guy Hocquenghem's The Amphitheater of the Dead for Guillotine Press. He also co-authored a book with Madeline, Fag/Hag, which will be out next year from Rosa Press.

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Follow Madeline @la_louve_rouge_ on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow Dave @thisisdavemaher on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to his other podcast, This Is Your Afterlife.

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Music by Kirk Rawlings from Courtesy and beige on beige

Cover art by Tuli Lane-McKinley