Family fun

Relive the erotic 1980 thriller ‘Cruising’ with this fun new children’s playset!

Cruising, children's playset

The controversial and oh-so-hot 1980s gay slasher film Cruising is now a children’s playset! Now you, your impressionable young son and his “friend” can relive the excitement and danger of pre-HIV New York City gay leather bar scene right in your own home.

The commercial for the thankfully fake children’s playset (below) shows two kids racing a van along an electronic racetrack. Attached to the racetrack are a miniature city block — complete with a gay bar named “The Clog” — and a wandering stranger. Simply get the cruisey stranger and the minivan driver to “lock eyes” and then use the electronic handheld set to decode which hanky code the stranger is flagging.

After that, if the stranger approaches the truck, you’ve won and can presumably have sex with and kill him, just like the murderer in the film — fun! But watch out for the cops!

Here’s the video for the Cruising home playset:

As we said, the toy is fake, but we love the father’s increasingly worried face as he realizes his son is learning about watersports and imagining a hairy leather queen dressed like a cop.

Related: ‘The Boys In The Band,’ ‘Cruising’ Director Shares Stories Of Controversies, Death Threats, Gay Murders And Barbra Streisand

When it was first released in 1980, William Friedkin’s erotic crime thriller was greeted by protests from the gay community for what negative depictions of gay men. The film doesn’t actually depict the gay community negatively — it merely depicts a cruisey leather bar and public sex in a matter-of-fact way. But since there weren’t many depictions of gay people in the media back then, let alone positive ones, protestors saw the film as harmful and exploitative.

The film has since been hailed as one of the hottest and most honest depictions of leather bar culture ever committed to film.

In 2012, James Franco and gay erotic director Travis Mathews collaborated on a modern day interpretation of Cruising entitled Interior. Leather Bar. which focused on a young actor’s homophobia and unease while filming a recreation of 40-minutes of explicit sexual footage cut from the original 1980 film.

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