Cruising with Boyd McDonald
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the way we all seem to become acquainted with Bob Mizer’s muscled men in posing straps in the pages of Physique Pictorial. It’s like a rite of passage. Cruising the Movies was my introduction. But McDonald, I soon learned, is best remembered for his notorious magazine Straight to Hell: The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts, which began publication in 1973 and featured reader-submitted sexual escapades. His books had one-word titles like Meat, Cum, and Wads. He billed it as “a magazine for the lower and upper classes: always coarse, never common.”

            Entries were edited but not censored. They often had a diaristic quality and were full of odd details that ring true to life and are often missing in more traditional porn. Describing a sex act with a married man in a public restroom, one reader wrote of how the man’s “cock was resting on my ear as I licked his balls.” Reader submissions ran alongside photos from the Athletic Model Guild (McDonald called Mizer “the DeMille of posing strap pictures”) or amateur photos.

            McDonald was interested in making a historical record, one built on memory and nostalgia for pre-gay-liberation sex. He convinced a handful of shops that sold pornographic materials to carry his self-published magazine. By the 1980s, its circulation reportedly had grown to 20,000. Gore Vidal was a fan. So is John Waters. McDonald collected and shared stories for more than twenty years, obsessively firing off missives, working with purpose and intensity.

            Cruising the Movies, originally published in 1985 by Gay Presses of New York, collects McDonald’s articles about film, many of them originally written for the magazine Christopher Street. The book was reissued in 2015 by Semiotext(e) with an indispensable introduction by filmmaker and author William E. Jones (who would later go on to write the definitive Boyd biography, True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell).

            McDonald was born in South Dakota in 1925, dropped out of high school, attended Harvard after World War II thanks to the G.I. Bill, and worked as a “hack writer” at Time and IBM, drinking himself into oblivion. He stopped drinking when he quit the corporate world, went on welfare, and moved into a single-room-occupancy hotel on the Upper West Side to devote himself to his life’s work: documenting the details of homosexual desire.

            He spent hours chain-smoking and watching old movies on a black-and-white TV that “cost $80 and has brought me an estimated $80 million worth of ecstasy.” He wrote Cruising the Movies with the aim of creating an encyclopedia of old Hollywood films airing on late-night TV: Westerns, circus pictures, gangster movies. “Many homosexuals are authorities on movies and my comments in this book, however much they may seem like hasty judgements, are the result of prolonged discussions with other authorities,” he wrote. He noted the date, time, and channel of each film he watched but omitted plot summaries, aware that this is not why we watch these movies. He described butts and bulges, the kind of images the censors of the Production Code couldn’t quite erase.

            Occasionally McDonald was taken by a leading performance, but more often he was struck by some bit player. He admired greatness more than “mere talent” and waxed rhapsodic about tight pants and what he called “unnerving groins.” He was not a fan of gym bodies, only of private parts and their potential for igniting sexual fantasies. “A man’s hand resting on his bulge,” he wrote, “is eloquent body language which says that he enjoys his meat and lets others enjoy it too.” McDonald tracked down photos at the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive to run with the articles. Often, he enlarged a choice piece of anatomy to make his point clear. He wasn’t interested in a female star’s glamour unless it was laced with irony or toughness. Jane Russell won his admiration for her “leering and sneering” in Macao (1952), all the more so because it seemed wholly inappropriate for the character she was playing, a nightclub singer badly in need of a job.

            McDonald’s writing was direct, crabby, bitingly funny, and fiercely political. He continually called out straight people’s hypocrisy, noting the casual way that homophobic remarks flew from the mouths of stars like Frank Sinatra, bringing “the word ‘faggot’ right into the lovely homes of our lovely families” and making it “a part of our lovely traditional family values.” McDonald especially hated Ronald Reagan—his politics and his body. (Reagan “could pass for a butch lez from the Women’s Army Corps,” he wrote of his bare-legged appearance in John Loves Mary (1949), noting with disgust: “Only heterosexuals could have cast this picture.”)

     A provocateur for the ages, McDonald delighted in spreading open homosexuality’s ass cheeks for all to see in. Reading his work is like zooming in on the lo-fi, off-center eroticism that would later be spotlighted in the pink pages of BUTT magazine, which celebrates different strokes for different folks. Through sharing what turns us on as individuals, we find community with others. Specificity is always interesting.

     And maybe that’s the real legacy of his work: to confront us as gay men and force us to reckon with the physicality of our individual desires—the sights, tastes, and smells that turn us on. Whereas Pink Narcissus shows us a stylized ideal, Cruising the Movies keeps it raw and real. And yet, at the time McDonald died (from emphysema), no one in his family even knew he was gay. Overwhelmed by the evidence of his obsessions when they were cleaning out his room afterward, they threw everything away.

 

Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brooklyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue and on his website, criticalinfluences.com.