Last June, as David was returning from visiting friends in New Jersey, he stopped to use a restroom in New York City’s Penn Station. He told Out Magazine that as he approached a urinal, he noticed one man watching him, while two others traded glances over the urinals’ dividers. David didn’t engage with any of them. However, before he knew it, the first man he noticed pulled out a badge and said, “All three of you are under arrest.” They were quickly escorted out of the bathroom in handcuffs and charged with public lewdness. David (whose real name was not used in Out) and the two others were just three of over 200 men arrested last summer as part of an Amtrak Police Department operation targeting the bathroom, which was listed as a “hotspot” on Sniffies, a map-based cruising platform. David’s charges would later be dropped after he completed a pre-court diversion program, but that didn’t make the experience any less traumatizing.
Among the 200 arrested last summer, at least 20 of the men were taken into ICE custody, the Gothamist reported. New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal told Out the arrests were “a rather frightening callback to a period that we thought had long passed in queer American history.”
That history is explored in writer Carmen Emmi’s directorial debut Plainclothes. Though the film has been overlooked by some of the major awards shows this season, it’s up for the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film this week, and it’s well worth a watch if you missed it when it was in theaters last fall. Set in Emmi’s hometown of Syracuse during the 1990s, the film follows Lucas (played by Tom Blyth), an undercover cop who entraps men in lewd conduct sting operations in the local mall bathroom. It’s during one of these stings that Lucas surprises himself by stumbling into a fleeting romance with a man named Andrew, played by Russell Tovey. Lucas’s life quickly descends into turmoil as he reckons with the ethical complications of his job, his sexuality, perceptions of masculinity, and the death of his father.
As much a psychological thriller as it is a romance, at its heart Plainclothes is a coming out story that interrogates the toll of policing your feelings to adhere to societal norms. The film shines a light on the extensive history of over-policing suffered by the LGBTQ+ community—a history that continues to this day.
Marc Robert Stein, a San Francisco State University history professor whose research focuses on constitutional law, social movements, gender, race and sexuality, said the history of cruising dates back to the 19th century in the United States. During periods of repression, popular cruising spots became targets of local police.
These sting operations reached their height during the Lavender Scare in the 1950s and ’60s, when allegations of homosexuality led to the firing of government and private sector employees. During this time, police surveilled gay bars, using entrapment techniques to arrest queer men who were looking not only for sex, but also for community. Later, after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, some of these tactics diminished, but they never completely stopped.
Emmi became interested in this history a decade ago, when he read a Los Angeles Times story about a series of lewd conduct sting operations conducted from 2012 to 2014 by Long Beach police officers. The “controversial, age-old police tactic,” as the paper described it, took more than two dozen men into custody and was heavily criticized for entrapment and discrimination against gay men. In the article, gay rights activists argued that the stings “can ensnare men who hadn’t otherwise been seeking sex and that they rarely, if ever, target straight people.” The backlash over those cases caused many law enforcement agencies in California to stop running these sting operations.
The Los Angeles Times piece inspired Emmi to write Plainclothes. As he continued to research, he joined online chatrooms that men used in the ’90s to find cruising spots, read ’70s cruising guides, and even cruised himself. One of the ways this research materialized was a particularly striking scene where Lt. Sollars, the police chief, shows Lucas and the other two officers a video of a new strategy they could use to “find and persecute the perverts.” The video is actual footage from Mansfield, Ohio, in 1962, where police set up hidden cameras behind a bathroom mirror to catch queer men cruising.
“I wanted people to know that this actually happened, and I wanted it to be preserved in some way,” Emmi said, noting that he did alter the men’s faces to restore their anonymity.
While Lucas watches the video, he wrestles with his feelings for Andrew and his complicity in the harm the stings bring to other queer men. In this moment, he’s forced to confront the fact that the life he’s built for himself to hide inside no longer serves him.
As Lucas reexamined his relationship to the toxic masculinity perpetuated by the men in his life, I was surprised to realize I felt sympathetic for the male characters in the film. They seemed more like products of their circumstances or cautionary tales of the results of self-policing or compulsory heterosexuality, rather than autonomous participants in their lives. None of them were capable of seeing outside their current reality for other possibilities. They serve as foils to Lucas as he navigates through this cult of masculinity.
While Lucas’ relationship with Andrew gives him a chance to explore his sexuality, it’s later revealed that Andrew is a husband, father, and reverend who sees his cheating and cruising as a sort of means to an end, and not an actual possibility for his life. Lucas’ family doesn’t offer him a positive example of masculinity either: Lucas’ kind-hearted father, Gus, has died, leaving his brutish uncle Paul as the closest thing he has to a father figure.
Emmi said he wanted to showcase the effects of toxic masculinity on American society, noting that “you can be surrounded by so much love,” from your immediate family, but if that same sort of acceptance and love isn’t embedded in the culture, “there’s the sense of like, beyond your front door isn’t safe.”
David Gerstner, a City University of New York cinema studies professor, said the characters’ sensation of surveillance brings to mind Michel Foucault’s panopticon theory. Through its camera work and use of sound, Gerstner said, the film shows how gay men at that time were “always looking over their shoulders,” ultimately internalizing the surveillance they were subject to.
While marginalized communities have always been subject to this internalized self-surveillance, that feeling of constant surveillance has, of course, only intensified in the digital age. With social media influencers and the rise of apps like Grindr and Sniffies, cruising has garnered more mainstream attention and caused some people to worry their safe spaces are being exposed to unwanted attention from outside their intended communities.
Along with the Ohio found footage, Emmi included his family’s home videos and sequences he’d filmed on his Hi8 camcorder during downtime on set to create a cinematic language for Lucas’s anxiety and hypervigilance. By collapsing both personal and communal histories, Plainclothes almost transcends any specific time or place—shining a light on the queer community’s past persecution, while also reflecting a kind of social surveillance that may feel uncannily familiar today. Although Emmi intended the film to be a period piece, it suggests that we aren’t as far removed from the past it depicts as we might think.
History isn’t “a simple repetition” of the past; while we aren’t reverting back to where things were, “on other levels, we’re seeing things worse than they’ve ever been.”
Stein, the history professor, noted that in the past, cruising arrests could have huge ramifications for men if their families, neighbors, or employers found out, even without a conviction or sentence. Although the potential for family rejection and employer discrimination might be different now, he said, “even today there are many families and employers, and neighbors who will react in hostile ways simply to an arrest, and the nature of media today means that information circulates much more easily and broadly.”
And while the federal government doesn’t control local policing, he said we’ve entered into a period where “local police feel emboldened under the current administration into engaging in practices that maybe have been in decline for the last several decades.” The Trump administration’s attack on LGBTQ rights, particularly among federal employees, prompted Lucas Schleusener, cofounder and CEO of Out in National Security, to tell the Washington Blade, that we’re in a “second Lavender Scare.” However, Stein said that history isn’t “a simple repetition” of the past; while we aren’t reverting back to where things were, “on other levels, we’re seeing things worse than they’ve ever been.”
There’s a bit of ambiguity about what happens next for Lucas at the end of Plainclothes. Ultimately, we learn that Andrew has rejected Lucas, fearful of being found out by his community. Sometime after this heartbreak, Lucas travels to his family’s New Year’s Eve party. Here he’s comforting his grieving mother; navigating a contentious relationship with his hypermasculine uncle, Paul; and frantically searching for an unopened letter from Andrew that he lost somewhere in the house. It’s at this party that Plainclothes comes to an end.
Uncle Paul finds the letter first, and shows it to Lucas’ mother. The revelation prompts a moment of confusion: The letter is addressed to “Gus”—the name Lucas used with Andrew, which is also Lucas’ father’s name. But in the film’s final moments, Lucas turns to his mother and tells her the letter was for him.
In the last shot, we watch a panting Lucas, his shocked mother, and an astonished, confused crowd of family members exchanging nervous looks. We can’t particularly pin down how Lucas’ mother has responded to him telling her the truth. She doesn’t say anything, but her face seems to move through a wave of emotions. She stands there teary-eyed, her brow furrowed as her mouth quivers. We see Lucas sigh, then the camera smashes to black.
For some, this ending—both the loss of Andrew and the exposure of Lucas’ secret without a clear resolution—could be unnerving. But Gerstner said he likes that the film resists the usual happy ending that many recent American coming-out films have. “Coming out narratives are important, as long as they complicate the world in which this coming out is taking place,” he said.
But for Emmi, the film’s ending is hopeful. It felt representative of the conversations he’d had with queer elders about their experiences coming out. While those conversations were heavy and at times tragic, Emmi said he always left feeling like they had hope for “for our community and for future queer people.”
The hope rests within the ambiguity of the scene’s final moments. We don’t know where Lucas goes from here, and with historical context we understand his journey won’t be without persecution or hardship, but we can still see that he’s starting to make decisions for himself honestly. We sense that this marks the beginning of his path to liberation from the shame and debilitating anxiety that has come from hiding from others and himself.
With Plainclothes, Emmi shows why it’s important to keep making films that add contours to the coming out experience, while also preserving the complexity of queer history and culture. While we may be decades past the setting of the film, Plainclothes challenges us to reckon with how much in our culture has really changed. But even as cruising culture is heavily scrutinized and threatened, Emmi’s film reminds us of why it’s an important part of queer history worth fighting to preserve—that at its core, cruising is still about connection and exploration of the self.
This post has been syndicated from Mother Jones, where it was published under this address.