I can answer the question from direct personal experience. I was 18 in 1980 and I saw the film with a group of straight guys at Iowa State where I went to school. I already had SOME idea what gay bars were like. The legal drinking age was 18, and I was a gay-bar veteran, having been to a grand total of two of them in Des Moines. Neither was anything special, but both were welcoming, safe, and if truth be told ... fairly boring. Nobody would ever want to make a movie in one, let's put it that way.

That scene in Cruising freaked me out. Were big city gay bars really like that? Was that that what I was in for when I finally left Iowa?

My friends had a lot more fun than I did. They sucked in their breath, yelled in disgust, and otherwise seemed to have a great time being shocked and horrified.

If I had ever imagined coming out to any of them, Cruising put the kibosh on that. (At least for a while.) I think I was afraid of seeming like a zoo exhibit.

1980 was a strange time. And by strange, I mean I don't think it fits the narrative that many of us think of today when we think of queer progress. So, even in Iowa, people who thought of themselves as liberal or on the left were generally very likely to think that gay rights and gay people were just fine, and that progress would march merrily along. I genuinely found myself surrounded by allies, which is a very strange thing to say about 1980, isn't it? (What that acceptance looked like and sounded like was very different from the way acceptance feels today, but how we queer people felt in 1980 was nevertheless valid.)

Queer people tended to be very optimistic, to presume that nothing was going to impede a quest for freedom to love and openly exist.

We didn't know HIV was already stalking us, and of course we could not imagine the eventual consequences not just to our own health and lives, but to how society looked at us and thought about us.

It's that sense of optimism that defines the context of my watching Cruising. It jarred me. It messed with my mind for a while. Maybe because I had grown up internalizing unhealthy messages about myself, I was particularly vulnerable to having those messages reinforced.

I certainly felt unhealthy after I left the theater that night. I can't really tell you any more than that, because I don't actually remember much, and because I never saw the film again. I probably won't, to be honest.

I don't have anything against the film, or against people who see value in it. But it left such a bad a taste in the mouth of my 18-year-old gay self that I don't see any reason to overcome my general aversion to films about murder and violence.