In his One Handed Histories: Eroto-politics of Gay Male Video Porn, John R. Burger suggests that part of the function of at least the initial round of gay hardcore porn features was to put homosexuals and homosexual acts into the history that they've been previously excluded from. Toby Ross' Cruisin' 57 is a fine example of this, being set during the 50s youth culture boom which produced such gay icons as James Dean but which had previously kept its queer face either hidden or subtextual. Cruisin' 57 shows its characters hanging out at burger bars, driving cool cars, sporting quiffs, listening to rock'n'roll and making out with members of their own sex – it's pornography with a social history function. Cruisin' 57 begins to put on screen a mid-20th century homosexual history which, if Boyd McDonald's various compendiums of written true stories of man-on-man sex are to be believed, existed in spades but which has previously been obliterated from the mainstream.
Ross' film finds the perfect style to do its work, being reminiscent of a wet dream in which a Happy Days episode is directed by Kenneth Anger. Rock'n'roll hits play and radio station jocks banter on the soundtrack as a selection of the boys in a certain 50s peer group get it on, in actuality or in their imagination. A clean-cut kid leaves a burger bar where his mates hang out with girls to play a visit to a male lover - they progress from looking at the lover's record collection to oral and anal sex; another kid jerks his shade-wearing buddy off in (appropriately) a Greek history class before imagining fellatio in the classroom; gradually, another kid comes to the front as protagonist – we've seen him shamed when he drops his books and his collection of pictures of hunky singers and actors spills over the floor. He keeps a diary, tells of his longing for a straight guy but when he gets to service the object of his desire as a mouth and bottom he feels unsatisfied, used. Next he jerks over the distant figure of a James Dean-type loner who he eventually gets to f**k in the latter's garage, a kind of queer porno version of the Greased Lighting section in Kleiser's 50s nostalgia musical.
The integration of rock'n'roll with montages of youths and scenes of sexual longing is fairly derivative of Anger's Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Komandos, but Ross does homosexual and American history a service by showing that the relentlessly heterosexual likes of American Graffiti and Happy Days were by no means the full story.
Ross' film finds the perfect style to do its work, being reminiscent of a wet dream in which a Happy Days episode is directed by Kenneth Anger. Rock'n'roll hits play and radio station jocks banter on the soundtrack as a selection of the boys in a certain 50s peer group get it on, in actuality or in their imagination. A clean-cut kid leaves a burger bar where his mates hang out with girls to play a visit to a male lover - they progress from looking at the lover's record collection to oral and anal sex; another kid jerks his shade-wearing buddy off in (appropriately) a Greek history class before imagining fellatio in the classroom; gradually, another kid comes to the front as protagonist – we've seen him shamed when he drops his books and his collection of pictures of hunky singers and actors spills over the floor. He keeps a diary, tells of his longing for a straight guy but when he gets to service the object of his desire as a mouth and bottom he feels unsatisfied, used. Next he jerks over the distant figure of a James Dean-type loner who he eventually gets to f**k in the latter's garage, a kind of queer porno version of the Greased Lighting section in Kleiser's 50s nostalgia musical.
The integration of rock'n'roll with montages of youths and scenes of sexual longing is fairly derivative of Anger's Scorpio Rising and Kustom Kar Komandos, but Ross does homosexual and American history a service by showing that the relentlessly heterosexual likes of American Graffiti and Happy Days were by no means the full story.