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Book Review: Cruising the Movies
Apr. 26th, 2022 08:40 amI picked up Boyd McDonald’s Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to the “Oldies” on TV under the impression that it was a book about queer subtext in old movies. Readers, it is NOT. Why bother looking for queer subtext when you can spend the whole movie looking at the actors’ asses? Indeed, why bother watching the movie at all, when there’s a movie poster that prominently displays said asses, as with Fraternity Row?
“I don’t know who modeled for the painting… but the figures, their butts, and their underpants are without flaw and without peer in art. In an El Greco or Delacroix grouping, perhaps only one or at most two men may look to be worth sucking off; in the Fraternity Row painting every single one does.”
This is an incredibly horny book. On occasion McDonald actually writes movie criticism, in which one gains at least a cursory idea of the mood and atmosphere of a movie (“Macao is like an Everard Baths with beaded curtains, wicker furniture, and women; the players look as though they can’t stand the sight of each other, yet want to suck each other off”), but only if his focus in the picture happens to be on an actress. If he’s focused on an actor, then the whole article is about the actor’s butt, groin, possible homosexual experience, post-acting career as a politician (this book was published in 1985), plus some vividly imagined sexual fantasies involving the actor’s life in Hollywood or, very occasionally, the actual characters in the movie. His chapter on Love Me Tender features extended musings on whether Elvis’s character enjoyed a few incestuous rolls in the hay with his brother.
Most of the chapters in this book were originally published as articles in the gay magazine Christopher Street, which was apparently where one published a raunchy thirst blog in those pre-internet days.
Is it good? Is it enjoyable? Neither of these words seem quite adequate. It is bracing, sometimes enjoyably so (“The only thing in this culture capable of awakening a ‘straight’ male’s full love and respect is a football player”), but just as often in a “bracing for impact” sort of way, as when McDonald describes his love of kung-fu movies (by which I mean his love of hairless Asian actors) or describes Tarzan’s sidekick Bomba the Jungle Boy as “a child molester’s dream.” Perhaps that one should have stayed in your head, McDonald!
It’s certainly an experience. A good experience? A bad experience? An experience too vast to be captured with mere adjectives? A sublime experience, in the old meaning of the world: too awe-inspiring to fully grasp in words.
“I don’t know who modeled for the painting… but the figures, their butts, and their underpants are without flaw and without peer in art. In an El Greco or Delacroix grouping, perhaps only one or at most two men may look to be worth sucking off; in the Fraternity Row painting every single one does.”
This is an incredibly horny book. On occasion McDonald actually writes movie criticism, in which one gains at least a cursory idea of the mood and atmosphere of a movie (“Macao is like an Everard Baths with beaded curtains, wicker furniture, and women; the players look as though they can’t stand the sight of each other, yet want to suck each other off”), but only if his focus in the picture happens to be on an actress. If he’s focused on an actor, then the whole article is about the actor’s butt, groin, possible homosexual experience, post-acting career as a politician (this book was published in 1985), plus some vividly imagined sexual fantasies involving the actor’s life in Hollywood or, very occasionally, the actual characters in the movie. His chapter on Love Me Tender features extended musings on whether Elvis’s character enjoyed a few incestuous rolls in the hay with his brother.
Most of the chapters in this book were originally published as articles in the gay magazine Christopher Street, which was apparently where one published a raunchy thirst blog in those pre-internet days.
Is it good? Is it enjoyable? Neither of these words seem quite adequate. It is bracing, sometimes enjoyably so (“The only thing in this culture capable of awakening a ‘straight’ male’s full love and respect is a football player”), but just as often in a “bracing for impact” sort of way, as when McDonald describes his love of kung-fu movies (by which I mean his love of hairless Asian actors) or describes Tarzan’s sidekick Bomba the Jungle Boy as “a child molester’s dream.” Perhaps that one should have stayed in your head, McDonald!
It’s certainly an experience. A good experience? A bad experience? An experience too vast to be captured with mere adjectives? A sublime experience, in the old meaning of the world: too awe-inspiring to fully grasp in words.
