Cruising is a novel written by New York Times reporter Gerald Walker and published in 1970.[1] The novel is about an undercover policeman looking for a homosexual serial killer in the gay New York City of 1970 before S/M and leather subcultures became well known (they existed but not to the extent they were portrayed in the film). The murder victims were closeted or relatively open (as open as they could be at the time) men who came across the killer while "cruising" for sex.