Here Steve's 'undercover' status serves as a metaphor for his closetedness (and vice versa) - while murder is committed at the behest of an internalised paternal voice of authority that regards homosexuality as a guilt that must be bloodily expunged.

The principal complaint, artistically, about Cruising is that it is not very clear at the rudimentary level of exposition of character and event. The problem... is in a script that never seems sure enough what it wants to say or prove.

William Friedkin's Cruising is a work of art.

Both Cruising and The Boys in the Band are deeply flawed but transfixing cinematic representations of gay life at a time before the decimation of a generation of promising young men and the galvanizing of those that miraculously survived.