YMMV / Cruising

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: During an interrogation, a large, muscular black man in a jock strap and a cowboy hat walks into the room and starts slapping the suspects. It's treated as perfectly normal and given no explanation. In a film set in leather bars with copious public BDSM acts, this is the strangest scene. It's presumably a reference to the alleged practice of doing something ridiculous to suspects during interrogations to make their claims of police brutality less likely to be believed.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The film was made during exactly the period when HIV was already running rampant but nobody actually knew it yet, making its more sexually explicit scenes — unsimulated and unprotected sex, remember — intensely difficult to watch. Made even stronger by a reference to someone apparently having hepatitis at one point.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Three years later, another Pacino character was asked if he was a homosexual and/or liked to dress up like a woman.
  • The film has a similar title to Crusin' 57 an unabashed gay porn from the previous year.
• Narm: Al Pacino's dancing. Also, the above-mentioned Big-Lipped Alligator Moment, which interrupts an otherwise fairly serious scene of homophobia-motivated police misconduct and receives no explanation whatsoever.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film is very much a time capsule of a bygone era in gay life; a year after its release, the first reports of AIDS-related illnesses were reported in New York City.

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