the homoeroticism of boys in 1950s movies and tv
Callahan Bracken (screenwriter and director) Boys Beware /
2017 [1 minute]
In Callahan Bracken’s 1-minute short
he uses a rotoscope and found footage to explore the issues that the original Boys
Beware couldn’t even have imagined, just how homoerotic youth films have
been over the years.
In one-minute he simply dusts off the surface of such a deeply
homoerotic culture, particularly in its depiction of young boys engaging in
competitive competition, marking them up with clown-like color and white-outs
on parts of their bodies which only re-emphasizes the sexuality of the images
of the 1950s.
This is certainly not a profound work given the superficiality of its
image bank, but it still drives home the point that homosexual-like images and
open homoerotic expressions of physical beauty are so very embedded in our
popular culture that any disdain of homosexuality as opposed to heterosexuality
is nearly absurd, young boys having already been inundated with the imagery in
their daily lives.
Today, given the many gaming sites and other sources of male sexuality
on Tik-Tok and what used to be called Twitter (now X), as well as Instagram and
Pinterest, not even to mention the thousands of available male porn sites, it
is virtually absurd to imagine that we need fear homosexuals themselves as the
villains in trying to entice young boys into LGBTQ sexual activity. The media, generally
pretending to reflect the heterosexual culture at large, has been far more
successful in selling gay sex to young boy—if young boys can be taught to
behave differently from their own in-born sexual desires.
If nothing else, this film reminds me, yet again, of why I never felt
completely divorced from gay images and models as I grew up. Yet clearly,
hundreds of boys could not identify the numerous homoerotic images on TV and
film, and had no opportunity to read books involving real homosexual and
lesbian heroes by such writers as André Gide, Thomas Mann, Jean Genet, Djuna
Barnes, Jane Bowles, and the others I encountered as a youth.
Los Angeles, January 1, 2024
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