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Many of the S-M practices take place at the bars, including handcuffing, whipping or urinating on a masochistic patron. Gay Writer Arthur Bell calls it "consensual grossness." Recalling a visit to the Mine Shaft, he constructs an unconvincing apologia: "What is happening around you smacks of decadence. But not of evil. These places are not hellholes of murder. There are no victors and victims. It is all theater, and these guys are pussycats." Well, not really. In various Village Voice articles on the leather bars, Bell has made the point that many homosexuals, far from being pussycats, seem to crave danger along with their sex. For example, one of the most popular trysting spots for New York gays in the mid-'70s was a rotting pier in Greenwich Village, where homosexuals regularly risked mugging, fire, police raids and the possibility of falling into the Hudson River through holes in the pier. Why? One theory is that oppression by the straight world has taught many gays to connect sex with guilt, shame and danger. John Devere, editor in chief of the gay magazine Mandate, believes that living underground for so many years has given homosexuals an appetite for the underground. Says he: "The taste for an after-midnight world of exciting [violent] sexuality is not anything to be derided, or taken lightly. It is by now an intrinsic part of many gay men's psychological makeup, and gives texture and meaning to a great many gay lives." Adds Anthropologist Edgar Gregersen of Queens (N.Y.) College, who studies sexual mores: "If you make your first sexual contact in a public toilet or in the back of a truck where the guy next to you may be a cop ready to arrest you or a psychopath waiting to hack off your genitals, Leather Gulch is an ideal ambience."
In their book Homosexuality in Perspective, Masters and Johnson report that homosexual males have more violent fantasies than heterosexual males. But they concede that their survey was small (120 subjects) and completed in 1968, before the Gay Liberation movement began, and thus may not be representative today.
Devere, who acted as an extra in Cruising, said he was "conscious-stricken" in the role "not because the movie was being made, but because the violence the movie depicts is uncomfortably close to anyone who frequents the night world in any gay area." Says he: "The enemy is not Cruising; it is not outside. The heart of darkness is within, after all. I'm saddened by that, and frightened for us all."