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Queering Teen Culture: All American Boys and Same-Sex Desire in Film & Television
by Jeffrey P. Dennis
Harrington Park Press
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Queering Teen Culture: All American Boys and Same-Sex Desire in Film & Television, by Jeffrey P. Dennis (Harrington Park Press, 221 pages, $16.95)

Cute boys are always news. And apparently in plentiful supply in American culture. In early colonial times they pop up in the diaries of Michael Wigglesworth, the 17th-century Harvard minister who berated himself for his lustful thoughts about his young charges. And in the late 19th, they begin appearing everywhere, from the swimmers-on-the-rocks in Thomas Eakins's paintings to the sturdy, if forlorn, newsboys and bootblacks of Horatio Alger novels. By the 1920s, Hollywood has invented Jackie Coogan and Jackie Cooper and a host of other cute little boys and adolescents (now mostly forgotten), such as Jack Coleman, Robert Gordon, and Jack Pickford (Mary's brother). Hell, people loved cute boys so much they even had girls play them-- Marguerite Clark played in a 1917 film of Prince and the Pauper, and Joyce Templeton played the younger version of the eponymous character in the 1916 film of Tom Brown's School Days. And from the 1920s to the present, the boys just tumble out on the silver and TV screens. From Frankie Thomas (who just died a few months ago) as Ted Nickerson in Bonita Granville's Nancy Drew film series in the 1930s, to Wally, Beaver, Bud, and my three sons in 1950s television, to today's Justin Timberlake and his ilk.

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In Queering Teen Culture, Jeffery Dennis, sociologist at Lakeland College, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has charted boy glamour-- mostly from the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s-- in an engaging survey that aims at a scholarly range and appeal but often falls into teen fanzine squawk.

There's nothing wrong with Dennis's basic premise: youths in popular culture in the 50s and 60s were certainly objects of sexual desire-- for women and men; girls and boys. And often, especially in light of today's understanding of gender and desire, they are often alarmingly and alluringly homoerotic.

"The teenage boy," Dennis writes, "trapped in the liminal space, caught in that moment of freedom between innocence and experience, between a presumably sexless boyhood and a presumably heterosexual adulthood, could not be silent."

Dennis, certainly, richly illustrates his point, discussing the homoerotics of TV shows and films such as Leave it To Beaver (Tony Dow), The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hickman), Rebel Without a Cause (Sal Mineo and James Dean), The Wild One (Marlon Brando), and Journey to the Center of the Earth (Pat Boone). How many have heard of Arch Hall, Jr. (The Choppers, 1961), John Ashley (Dragstrip Girl, 1959), Rod Loren (Terrified, 1962), or Gary Conway (I Was a Teenage Frankenstein)? Well, actually some people may have heard of Conway, who was also featured in Physique Pictorial.

There's some great gossip: Tommy Kirk was outed in 1963 by a boyfriend's irate mother. But after 187 pages it begins to feel more like a list of who looks/acts/performs queer than a sustained analysis of why all this is happening.

Dennis's bottom line is identifying and describing these homoeroticized male performers. And he does describe them rather vividly-- repeatedly noting their "beautifully sculpted bodies" or how they were "shoved into tight jeans and t-shirts." Dennis's breathlessness moves his book closer to fan culture than serious scholarship. This is compounded by his sweep-- how he moves from 1950s TV, to teen beach movies, pop-star musicals, the teen gore films of the 1970s such as Friday the 13th, to teen soap operas, and reality TV shows. Along the way, the differences between these genres and time-periods are almost obliterated. While there's a cultural line-- not always very straight-- running from the 1940s to the present, the milieu that produced James Dean is extraordinarily different from that giving us " Dawson's Creek" and "The Real World." The homoerotic auras of teen idols may not be the best thread for finding the inner connection.

Queering Teen Culture doesn't always hold together as a cohesive, persuasive argument. But as a gossipy Baedeker to the pop boy idol across-the-decades, Dennis gives us a great view.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com