William Friedkin’s Cruising (1980), starring Al Pacino as an undercover cop investigating murders in New York’s leather scene, ignited what Jack Fritscher calls a “gay civil war” — a bitter split between the assimilationist gaystream, embodied by The Boys in the Band, and the leathermen the film’s protestors felt it caricatured as murderers. Fritscher’s own connection ran deep: Wally Wallace, founder of the Mineshaft, refused to let Friedkin’s crew film inside the actual club, and later told Fritscher on videotape how the production staged a police raid just to photograph the interior anyway. Fritscher’s full essay on the film and the fractured community response it provoked is collected as DVD bonus material.