Double Takes: ‘Nighthawks’ (1978) ★★★ / ‘Strip Jack Naked: Nighthawks 2’ (1991) ★★★

Being gay sure seemed sexier when I was in the closet. Not that I regret coming out—Lord knows, I stayed in the closet far longer than I should have—but I when I finally did it seemed, I dunno, anticlimactic. Oh, there were tears shed by my family, with assurances that they would love me “even if you were a child molester.” (Pro tip: if someone comes out to you, please don’t ever tell them this, no matter how well meaning.) This I was prepared for and considered it the price of entry. Having paid it, I was ready for all the sexy fun. Instead, I discovered that living as an out gay man was not, as I’d hoped, like living in a Falcon or Kristen Bjorn video, but instead just as mundane as living as a straight man.

I might have been better prepared if I had watched Ron Peck’s 1978 film Nighthawks instead of all those Falcon and Kristen Bjorn videos. The movie follows Jim (Ken Robertson, delivering the film’s most natural performance), a young-ish schoolteacher who spends his nights prowling London’s gay clubs for fresh cock. That lurid premise is amplified by the film’s grainy cinematography and unpolished acting that gives Nighthawks the aesthetics of a ’70s porno flick.  

The well-built Robertson's nude scenes notwithstanding, Nighthawks isn’t all that lurid or sexy. Peck and his collaborator Paul Hallam are more concerned with capturing the awkward moments before and after Jim’s hookups, how in each instance either Jim or his Mr. Right Now make it plain that they hope this one night might lead to something more, even as they have an eye peeled for Mr. More Right. The movie perfectly captures the quiet desperation of being rejected, as when Jim waits hours in a pub for his cutest hookup to arrive for a second date, refusing to believe he’s been stood up. Yet Jim is shown to be equally callous when the hard-on is in the other man’s pants.

The film also nicely captures the delicate dance gay men of the time had to maintain between their private and professional lives. Jim is careful to drop his tricks off a block away from their jobs the next morning. Even though several of his colleagues know he’s gay, Jim tries to be discreet at his job—until near the film’s end, when one of his students asks if he is “bent.” Jim, fed up with having to hide his true self, tells the student he is, then proceeds to answer all his students’ follow-up questions, no matter how offensive. Surprisingly, he is not fired for doing so, only reprimanded, suggesting that 1978 London was still better than present-day Florida.

Nighthawks may be a significant movie, but it is not exactly an entertaining one. At nearly two-hours, this plotless film often rambles and is frequently boring, with several scenes that left me wondering if the movie had a point. There are scenes of Jim just standing in nightclubs, his eyes darting around, scoping out potential tricks, that go on for several minutes—minutes made more excruciating by Nighthawks’ atrocious ersatz disco soundtrack. 

Peck’s 1991 follow-up Strip Jack Naked: Nighthawks 2 isn’t a sequel so much as a personal essay mixed with a making-of documentary, with some bonus footage of naked men wandering around for no apparent reason other than shoehorning in some prurient content. The movie features several scenes cut from the original film (among Peck’s revelations is that the initial cut of Nighthawks was nearly three and a half hours long), and in showing them you begin to see the potential for a better edit than what was ultimately released. I, for one, would’ve gladly sacrificed one of Jim’s morning after scenes for the scene in which he goes home with a man who wants to play rough as the scene illustrates the darker side of hooking up. Then again, since this scene is explicitly sexual it may have been cut for censorship reasons. 

More compelling are Peck’s reflections on growing up queer, including a schoolboy crush gone wrong, coming out, and navigating gay life in the 1970s, when he was always on the hunt for sex but secretly hoping to find Mr. Right. “And when I thought I came close, I saw another who I thought would take me closer, and another, and another. And many a time he’d give me the slip after one night…or turn down the offer of a drink or a cigarette with a smile before walking away, as [I] did [myself] to so many others.”

Perhaps more relatable to today’s audiences are Peck’s recounting of the election of Margaret Thatcher and her government’s attack against civil liberties, specifically those regarding the LGBTQ community. The emergence of HIV-AIDS in the 1980s only added fuel to the homophobic fire. “Across the media, gay now equaled AIDS,” Peck observes. He does end Strip Jack Naked on a hopeful note, because one had reason to be hopeful in the 1990s. Not so sure about 2024.