Beyond ’50 Shades Darker’: These seven films deliver a more erotic brand of sexuality

Cruising / Interior. Leather Bar.

Regardless of the best intentions of its author, anytime a writer sits down to write about sex and cinema they’re going to brush up against the problematic. It is with this in mind that we present to you William Friedkin’s 1980 release Cruising, which was widely condemned by the gay community at large in its era (the noise from the mass protests outside of the shoot actually led the filmmakers to scrap almost all the diegetic sound in favor of overdubs). Cruising, which is about a New York cop (Al Pacino) stalking a killer of gay men in the leather bars of ’80s NYC, is simultaneously less upsetting than its critics would have you believe and exactly how they say it is. However, Friedkin’s commitment to some sort of accuracy insured it was all shot on location in the S&M clubs in NYC, and features many places eventually lost to time. It’s well worth a watch simply for the historical documentation and context it provides, and is complemented excellently by James Franco and Travis Mathews’ Interior. Leather Bar., which features the two attempting to recreate 40 minutes of lost, more explicit footage from that film.