What happens when artwork problematizes politics and politics problematizes artwork? Against the impulse to valorize agonistic insurrection as such, we examine the foment and fallout of demonstrations that erupted in New York City, which sought to sabotage the production of William Friedkin’s controversial film Cruising (1980). Set in the world of gay leather s/m, Cruising has been panned as a patently homophobic film whose only salutary outcome was that its production and distribution galvanized the formation of national LGBT organizations advocating for more “positive representation” in media and politics. I gain distance from this narrative through consideration of a cluster of contemporaneous interviews conducted with Michel Foucault some of which were destined for popular circulation through newly minted queer publications such as Gai Peid and The Advocate. Among those scholars who have engaged these interviews seriously, the tendency has been to situate Foucault’s remarks upon queer leather s/m as not-so-veiled apologies for his own sexual proclivities. By contrast, I draw from interview and contemporaneous accounts, supplemented by resources furnished by cinema studies, to instead propose that Foucault is making principled interventions into the contentious political debates roiling the emergent North American queer community sparked by the film Cruising. Throughout these interviews Foucault consistently critiques the ways the queer politics of positive representation play out through disciplinary modes that inculcate a false choice between normalization and exclusion because, in both cases, they impoverish worldly plurality.