Please leave James Dean and Sal Mineo alone. Leave their memories alone. Let them rest in peace. There are so many themes about which you can write... Who Jimmy loved or did not love was his concern and noone else's. Thanks. Paula, Portugal
Somewhat off topic, I but recently viewed "Kenneth Anger's Gossip" on YouTube. It was an appalling self-revelation of the author. Gimlet eyed and ghastly stone-faced, he pumped up his minor involvement as a filmmaker and repeatedly referred to his Hollywood Babylon books as some kind of canon. His unhealthy obsession with death and weird visions of Queer life startle at every turn. Most disturbing are his easy acceptance of unfounded and untraced rumors. Dean, of course, makes his appearance front and center when he actually gets to Hollywood Icons. Some truly forgettable and long forgotten bit players are brought forward from Anger's youth to no real purpose.
Jason, when the topic turns to Dean, you do injury to your reputation as the apostle of sweet reason. Look again at what you've written. What does it come to? Gay authors repeat a silly ghost story that (you suggest) probably first appeared in a gay publication. You attribute this story to homophobia. But the only vaguely-similar story to appear in an earlier mainstream publication has no reference of any kind to homosexuality.
In other words, gay people came up with a yarn you decry as homophobic. Because you don't like said yarn, you blame it on an amorphous, reified "homophobia," even though you can't point to a single straight person who played a role in the story's transmission. Hell, I never even heard this story until this morning.
When I see this kind of anti-logic, I imagine how I would respond if someone suggested (say) that white people forced Ray Charles to take heroin. No matter what hardships Charles went through in his life -- and yes, I know the story -- each individual ultimately bears responsibility for the initial decision to take poison.
Similarly, gay people and ONLY gay people are the ones responsible for this bit of silliness. Gay magazines and newspapers published a lot of silly shit in the 70s (as did all sorts of other magazines serving other subcultures). Pointing to some outside force and screeching "They MADE us do it...!" is just childish.
A lot of us straight white males are getting VERY testy about this. We are no longer going to be used as the scapegoat whenever others do injury to themselves.
A homophobic narrative need not arise from straight people. You may be familiar with the concept of "internalized homophobia," and to understand the forces at work in the 1970s, you also need to be familiar with the popular understanding of sexuality at the time, which was still rooted in the midcentury Freudian notion that homosexuality was either induced by bad parenting or transmitted by sexually predatory homosexuals who lured unsuspecting youths into sin. Because this was how even most gay men of the time understood themselves, it is no wonder they would create a fictitious story that embodied a distorted, supernatural form of the traditional narrative. That doesn't make it any less homophobic; indeed, some of the most harshly critical homophobic voices arguing against James Dean belonged to gay and bisexual men.
If you can't see that the 1980s narrative is textually dependent on the 1969 story, I can't help you.
Just read an article about Sal on the Vanity Fair website and found this:
"Mineo was stabbed to death at the age of 37 in 1976, in a situation that was most likely a robbery gone wrong but has still garnered plenty of speculation over the years. But his legacy lives on powerfully in Rebel Without a Cause, in which he plays Plato as a boy learning before our eyes how powerful his feelings for another man can be—most likely because Mineo himself was doing the exact same thing. “I had no idea or understanding of affection between men,” Mineo later said of an early screen test with Dean, which can still be seen on YouTube. “And for the first time, I felt something strong.”"
Unless I'm misunderstanding his quote, it appears Sal knew he had feelings for men long before James Dean died.
I believe you're right, about that. There was that scene they did together that triggered an epiphany (as the article said) but I think he suspected before that. Check out the biography written by Michaud. It's called SAL, and it's dynamite. I had a crush on Bobby Sherman. Little did I know he and Mineo were lovers.
Please leave James Dean and Sal Mineo alone. Leave their memories alone. Let them rest in peace. There are so many themes about which you can write... Who Jimmy loved or did not love was his concern and noone else's. Thanks. Paula, Portugal
Somewhat off topic, I but recently viewed "Kenneth Anger's Gossip" on YouTube. It was an appalling self-revelation of the author. Gimlet eyed and ghastly stone-faced, he pumped up his minor involvement as a filmmaker and repeatedly referred to his Hollywood Babylon books as some kind of canon. His unhealthy obsession with death and weird visions of Queer life startle at every turn. Most disturbing are his easy acceptance of unfounded and untraced rumors. Dean, of course, makes his appearance front and center when he actually gets to Hollywood Icons. Some truly forgettable and long forgotten bit players are brought forward from Anger's youth to no real purpose.
Jason, when the topic turns to Dean, you do injury to your reputation as the apostle of sweet reason. Look again at what you've written. What does it come to? Gay authors repeat a silly ghost story that (you suggest) probably first appeared in a gay publication. You attribute this story to homophobia. But the only vaguely-similar story to appear in an earlier mainstream publication has no reference of any kind to homosexuality.
In other words, gay people came up with a yarn you decry as homophobic. Because you don't like said yarn, you blame it on an amorphous, reified "homophobia," even though you can't point to a single straight person who played a role in the story's transmission. Hell, I never even heard this story until this morning.
When I see this kind of anti-logic, I imagine how I would respond if someone suggested (say) that white people forced Ray Charles to take heroin. No matter what hardships Charles went through in his life -- and yes, I know the story -- each individual ultimately bears responsibility for the initial decision to take poison.
Similarly, gay people and ONLY gay people are the ones responsible for this bit of silliness. Gay magazines and newspapers published a lot of silly shit in the 70s (as did all sorts of other magazines serving other subcultures). Pointing to some outside force and screeching "They MADE us do it...!" is just childish.
A lot of us straight white males are getting VERY testy about this. We are no longer going to be used as the scapegoat whenever others do injury to themselves.
A homophobic narrative need not arise from straight people. You may be familiar with the concept of "internalized homophobia," and to understand the forces at work in the 1970s, you also need to be familiar with the popular understanding of sexuality at the time, which was still rooted in the midcentury Freudian notion that homosexuality was either induced by bad parenting or transmitted by sexually predatory homosexuals who lured unsuspecting youths into sin. Because this was how even most gay men of the time understood themselves, it is no wonder they would create a fictitious story that embodied a distorted, supernatural form of the traditional narrative. That doesn't make it any less homophobic; indeed, some of the most harshly critical homophobic voices arguing against James Dean belonged to gay and bisexual men.
If you can't see that the 1980s narrative is textually dependent on the 1969 story, I can't help you.
Just read an article about Sal on the Vanity Fair website and found this:
"Mineo was stabbed to death at the age of 37 in 1976, in a situation that was most likely a robbery gone wrong but has still garnered plenty of speculation over the years. But his legacy lives on powerfully in Rebel Without a Cause, in which he plays Plato as a boy learning before our eyes how powerful his feelings for another man can be—most likely because Mineo himself was doing the exact same thing. “I had no idea or understanding of affection between men,” Mineo later said of an early screen test with Dean, which can still be seen on YouTube. “And for the first time, I felt something strong.”"
Unless I'm misunderstanding his quote, it appears Sal knew he had feelings for men long before James Dean died.
I believe you're right, about that. There was that scene they did together that triggered an epiphany (as the article said) but I think he suspected before that. Check out the biography written by Michaud. It's called SAL, and it's dynamite. I had a crush on Bobby Sherman. Little did I know he and Mineo were lovers.