Cruising and The Boys
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The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir
by William Friedkin
HarperCollins. 512 pages, $29.99

IN THE 1970s, William Friedkin directed some of the most important works of American cinema, including The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973)—not to mention The Boys in the Band (1970) and Crusing  (1980), two gay-themed films that some GLBT viewers reviled and even publicly protested against. Decades later, the (heterosexual) force behind two of the era’s most visible depictions of gay life shares his personal take in this frustratingly breezy but persistently engaging memoir.