William
Friedkin’s Cruising (1980) startled filmviewers
by portraying a serial killer of gay men who enjoy sadomasochistic
sexual arousal, with an undercover cop who was straight. Hard,
released to the general public in Los Angeles in midsummer
1999, ups the ante on Cruising by focusing on closeted gay
homicide detective Raymond Vates (played by Noel Palomaria).
Director John Huckert goes beyond Cruising
by supplying much more blood on his corpses and far more extreme
bondage scenes to produce a film that he expects may become
a genre film but not, due to the gore, a commercial success.
Similar to Cruising, the film Hard
is based in part on a true story—in this case, serial killer
Jeffrey Dahmer provides many of the ideas for the scenes.
Unlike Cruising, the principal theme of Hard
is not the investigation of an unknown killer; Jack (played
by Malcolm Moorman) is identified at the very beginning of
the film as a misanthropic drifter and ex-con. Instead, the
film focuses on how a gay cop copes with his homophobic colleagues
in the Homicide Division of the Los Angeles Police Department,
where the prevailing culture parallels Jack’s view that the
death of gays (called "homocide") is some sort of public service.
At first, Vates tries to keep his sexual identity in the closet,
but he does not fool Jack, who has seen him investigating
at the scene of one of the bodies. When Vates encounters Jack
at a gay bar while looking for the killer, Jack seduces him;
in the morning after the two sleep together, Vates awakens
to find that Jack has handcuffed him to his bed and has stolen
his LAPD shield. He then has to come out to his partner Tom
Ellis (played by Charles Lanyer), who is accepting because
Vates is an excellent detective. When Vates’s police shield
shows up in the mouth of the next victim, however, he becomes
a suspect, so Internal Affairs learns that he is gay, and
the word spreads to his Homicide colleagues, who taunt Vates
with homophobic discourse, and then beat him up with impunity
after work in the presence of his boss, Captain Foster (played
by Bob Hollander), whereupon he believes that he has no recourse
but to resign from the force. Indeed, LAPD Sergeant Mitchell
Grobson, the first police officer in the United States to
sue for discrimination based upon sexual orientation, makes
a cameo appearance in the film as Brent. To further underscore
the realistic theme of the film, Filipino-American Palomaria
has admitted that he went to two police departments to learn
how to be an authentic homicide detective, but the first police
department cut short his training when he disclosed that he
would be playing a gay cop. Hard is conceived
as the first of a trilogy to deal with perhaps the most pressing
fear that has terrified gays for millennia—the willingness
of non-gays to look the other way while those in authority
act as anti-gay vigilantes. Unlike Cruising,
where sadomasochism and leather bars alone are presented as
sensational elements, Hard also looks into
the darkest elements of our society, in which so many heterosexists
are hysterical about wanting to deny any authentic recognition
to same-sex love relationships. Thus, at the end of the film,
Vates asks, albeit disingenuously, "Where does all the hate
come from?" In a culture where certain religious and political
leaders seem determined to institutionalize homophobia, preferring
Condemnianity to Christianity, it is no accident that gays
often live with internalized homophobia, as portrayed so eloquently
in William Friedkin’s Boys in the Band (1970).
In Hard, we should not be surprised that a few
gays whose internalized homophobia is most extreme—masculine
gays—turn out to be either sadistic or masochistic or both.
The Political Film Society has nominated Hard
for an award as a 1999 film focusing on human rights--showing
how police persecute gays rather than treating them as ordinary
citizens with as much rights as everyone else. MH
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want to comment on this film
