I've never seen Cruising but you showed a still from Dog Day Afternoon as part of this article and I have to say I was VERY pleasantly surprised by how sensitively and nuanced that movie depicted queer and trans characters. You only find out the main character is bisexual around the midpoint of the movie, and realise his actions are all to get money so his trans partner can have the surgery she needs to transition, even if it means they won't be together. The trans character is not portrayed as a villain, nor as ridiculous for wanting to transition. While the main character is shown to be somewhat abusive to his partners (both his wife and his trans partner) it's also shown that he loves his partner more than anything else and would sacrifice anything for them. (I use "she/they" pronouns for the trans character because Al Pacino's character uses he/him pronouns for them but by today's standards she would be a trans woman and go by she/her pronouns, but the show doesn't draw a strong distinction between a gay relationship and a relationship between a bisexual man and a trans woman so it's unclear exactly how to refer to the trans character with modern terminology so I'm using she/they to try and straddle that confusion).

Anyway while Pacino's character is no hero and is rightly broken up with by the trans character, who sets good boundaries against him because their relationship was toxic, I still like the way the movie depicted Pacino's character as an antihero with a lot of popular support. He didn't want anyone to die in his bank robbery and did what he could to try and escape while avoiding any harm to his hostages. He had the people cheering for him taking a stand against "the man". He was shown to be both bisexual in that he loved his trans partner "as a man loves another man" but also supporting her transition and robbing the bank to fund that for her.

Ultimately, when I watched it going in blind (it was a random movie I saw on a plane) I was very impressed and pleasantly surprised. Of course it could be handled better but for a movie made in the 70s it must have been groundbreaking.