I was at a local BDSM club a few months back during a special presentation of pictures take at the Mine Shaft, a gay leather club in the famous meatpacking district of New York. (OK It was actually a year ago last February, I had to look it up.) He started it off by showing a clip of this film that was actually shot in the club, featuring real patrons of the club and scene. This film which takes a peak into the leather lifestyle at the time before AIDs has finally been released on DVD. You can find a review of it here and the IMDB info here.
From the review:
The film stars Al Pacino as a cop who goes undercover in the New York leather bar scene in order to solve a series of murders and ends up, well, becoming a little sexually confused.
Its director, William Friedkin, had already produced one of the seminal gay films of the ’70s with ‘The Boys in the Band’, but here he was dealing with a gay world where people didn’t just go to have drinks and polite chats; it was overtly, defiantly sexual. That was liberating in the mid-’80s as Britain definitely looked to America as a kind of paradise for gays, especially places like New York and San Francisco.
‘Cruising’ is carefully constructed and Friedkin visited some notorious clubs to do his research. Also, a lot of the people in the film are real gays, so in some ways it does have an authentic feel, similar to his previous ‘The French Connection’ (1971). It almost works as
a nostalgic look back to the golden age of pre-Aids New York, but there are a few too many muscle men dressed in PVC police uniforms and licking their truncheons in the background.
It is an interesting movie, and a part of our culture and history in the Lifestyle.
MV
The House of Void 
I think you should edit that to simply say “and a part of our culture and history.” because it belongs to everyone. And I haven’t seen the movie (sorry, I was in grade/middle school in the 80’s) but I’ll watch it this week.