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Tab Hunter Confidential; The Making of a Movie Star
by Tab Hunter (with Eddie Muller)
Algonquin Books
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An early review of Tab Hunter Confidential-- the new autobiography by the eponymous film star-- noted that Hunter's homosexuality was one of the big secrets of the 1950s.

Really? One wonders where she'd been for the last half century. Tab Hunter's sexuality-- like that of Rock Hudson, Tony Perkins, James Dean, Sal Mineo, and a host of other nubile male stars of the decade-- was pretty much an open secret. Sure, the teenaged girl reading Photoplay in a soda shop in 1957 may not have gotten it (though certainly the teenage queen would), but almost everyone in the industry and the press knew. How could they not? Hollywood is essentially a small town and even setting up these male stars on dates with starlets, trumpeting their PR-invented romantic lives in press releases, and even covering up their run-ins with the law (resulting from cruising or being arrested at gay gatherings) was not going to fool people in-the-know.

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Up until now we've not had a really good look at this aspect of 1950s Hollywood's semi-closeted gay culture; the biographies of stars of this period are insufficient. Many books on James Dean continue to overplay his heterosexual romances (some of which may have been actual, not invented; although the person Dean loved most was probably Dean himself). And Charles Winecoff's Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins-- while enormously fun and gossipy and filled with great tidbits-- lacks a comprehensive, analytic approach to the subject.

While Hunter's autobiography is not analytic in any academic sense, it's comprehensive and gives a detailed look at that era's Hollywood gay scene that's both new and eye opening.

Even better, Hunter's book is modest-- there's little self-aggrandizement, little self-flattery, and little bitterness here. Now in his 70s, Hunter seems beyond all that: as vivid as much of the detail is here, it feels very much in the past for the author, making Tab Hunter Confidential feel fresh and bracingly honest, all the more notable as the genre of star-autobiography isn't usually breeding-ground of honesty or emotional truth. By book's end, you realize Hunter managed to avoid the harm and the damage that the industry visited on so many people.

Hunter was, in many ways, one of the great golden boys of the 1950s. While his film career is OK- to-lackluster-- he made six films beginning in 1950 before he got a real starring part in the 1955 Battle Cry, and after that, with few exceptions, was trapped in pleasant, aimless pieces of fluff like The Pleasure of His Company-- he also had his own (short-lived) TV series, and a full-fledged recording career. But much of Hunter's contribution to American culture was simply being Tab Hunter. He was the darling-- along with Rock Hudson and Troy Donahue-- of the teen movie mags, and embodied the ideal of 1950s American true-blue, drop-dead-handsome masculinity. He was every girl's dream-date and every boy's ideal.

Hunter strikes a nice balance between narrating his professional life-- from joining the Coast Guard at 15-- and his personal life, including a long term affair with Anthony Perkins, his other relationships and lots of sexual escapades. But through all of this we garner a terrific sense of what it meant to be gay-- and moderately openly so-- in a 1950s Hollywood culture that promoted heterosexuality even as it did so with male stars who were obviously otherwise. This is really at the heart of Tab Hunter Confidential-- although not stated outright: what's going on in the 1950s when a new American masculinity that's prettier, softer, nicer, gentler, and less macho gets promoted by Hollywood to a culture that's also transforming its family and gender roles.

Obviously the 1950s was not the completely repressive, intolerant decade that is its stereotype. It was a time of great change and often highly surprising social transformation. As historian Stephanie Coontz has written, "'Leave it to Beaver' was not a documentary," and obviously Photoplay and Movie World were not accurate records of people's personal lives.

One of the great things about Tab Hunter Confidential is that its author understands who he is and the world in which he worked. He never took himself so seriously that he lost the sense of who he was. That's why, as many of the other teen stars faded, Hunter survived. As early as 1965 he is essentially playing a parody of himself in Tony Richardson's The Loved One and a decade later had no problem doing the same thing on "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman." This brought him to a whole second career in John Waters's Polyester and in films such as Lust in the Dust. Hunter's understanding of the parody and fluidity of the 1950s-- of which he was emblematic-- allowed him to have a career far longer than one might've expected. Tab Hunter Confidential is the next step in that career-- and it's the most entertaining, illuminating one yet.

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