Contagious Relations: Simulation, Paranoia, and the Postmodern Condition in William Friedkin's 'Cruising' and Felice Picano's 'The Lure'
RIS ID
12069
Abstract
Appearing within months of one another in the American cultural marketplace, Felice Picano’s novel The Lure (1979) and the feature film Cruising (1980), written and directed by William Friedkin, both feature plots in which a nominally straight man goes “undercover” as homosexual in Manhattan’s gay ghetto to help police trap a killer of gay men and emerges from this experience—strongly marked in both texts as a traumatic one—with his heterosexual identity either relinquished in favor of a fully fledged gayness (The Lure) or seriously destabilized (Cruising).
Publication Details
Davidson, G. R. (2005). Contagious Relations: Simulation, Paranoia, and the Postmodern Condition in William Friedkin's 'Cruising' and Felice Picano's 'The Lure'. GLQ: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, 11 (1), 23-64.