On the occasion of the DVD release of 1970's The Boys In The Band, Andrew O'Hehir has interviewed William Friedkin. Friedkin is best known to the general public as the man who engineered the back-to-back successes of The French Connection and The Exorcist, then flopped forever more. For hardcore film nerds and auteurists, he's either a constant failure or an underrated master.

Aside from small cult affairs like 2003's The Hunted — a fairly brilliant pared-down continuous chase film derided for its deliberate lack of characterization — the reason Friedkin annoys a lot of people are a twin pair of gay-themed films viewed fairly continuously as homophobic. The Boys In The Band annoyed post-Stonewall gays for its ostensibly stereotypical portrait of self-loathing queens going at it for condescending straight viewers having their worst fears confirmed. 1980's Cruising — cop Al Pacino vs. gay murderers in New York's S&M scene — was reviled even before it was filmed; as Trenton Straube wrote when the film was re-issued on DVD last year, the Village Voice's Arthur Bell predicted it would be "the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on the screen." When it was released, the National Gay Task Force compared it to The Birth Of A Nation.

Whether or not the films are inadvertently homophobic is beside the point. What O'Hehir's interview shows is something I've suspected for a long time: Friedkin is a director so sociopathically honed in on exploring environments, he's completely indifferent when it comes to any sense of social responsibility.

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