Aaron Carter: The golden boy of the fall of 2000 comes out as bi, shows his d*ck, has a hard life. Brother Nick: "Hurts to love you."

Link to Aaron's n*de photos

Aaron Carter, the younger brother of Nick Carter of The Backstreet Boys, burst into teen idol fame with his debut album (entitled Aaron Carter, naturally), released in 1997, when he was just nine years old. It sold a million copies.  A second album, Aaron's Party: Come and Get It (2000), sold two million copies and peaked at #4 on the U.S. charts.  

To those who were young in the fall of 2000, songs like "Bounce," "Aaron's Party," and a highly risque version of "I Want Candy" became symbols of a golden age of innocence,  became an icon of the fall of 2000, along with "Who Let the Dogs Out," "Kryptonite," and "Dance with Me."

 

The sizzling star appeared as himself on Sabrina the Teenage Witch (2001) and Lizzie McGuire (2001), and started high-profile romances with Hilary Duff (Lizzie) and Lindsey Lohan (The Parent Trap).

New albums were released in 2001 and 2002, but in the post-911, War on Terror world, that golden age seemed impossibly naive, and Aaron's star faded.  He continued to tour and release new songs, but none of them charted.  Focusing on his acting, he played:

Harry (one of the daughter's boyfriends) on two episodes of 7th Heaven (2004)

A classmate of the live action Fat Albert (left, with Shedrach Taylor III as Rudy).

A Hannah Montana-like incognito popstar in Popstar (2005).  Former popstars David Cassidy and Leif Garrett (right) appeared.

Marty in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (2006), with Jeff Garlin (soon to star in The Goldberg) as a man looking for someone to each cheese with.

Brian in College Fright Night (2014), about a vampire infestation at a college, with former teen stars Todd Bridges and Dustin Diamond in the cast.

More after the break

Austin Butler: Buddy-bonding teen idol, heteronormative adult hunk

This  amiable, grinning face -- and this well-defined chest -- are familiar to millions of gay and straight teens. They belong to Austin Butler, an Orange County boy who was discovered by a talent agent in 2005, when he was 13 (apparently such things still happen).

Soon he was appearing all over the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, on Hannah Montana, ICarly, Zeke and Luther, The Wizards of Waverly Place, Zoey 101, and Jonas, usually as the boy that Hannah or Carly or Alex has a crush on.

And not just the Disney Channel. In Rudy and the Rockits (2009-2010), Austin played Jordan Gallagher, son of former teen idol Patrick Gallagher (Patrick Cassidy), who has a crush on his cousin Ruby (daughter of David Cassidy's character).

 In 2011, he starred in the High School Musical spin-off Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure, as the boy Sharpay hooks up with.

He starred in the tv series The Carrie Diaries (2013), a prequel to Sex in the City about Carrie's high school years, as one of the boys Carrie hooks up with.

You'd think that with so many roles as the object of a girl's crush, Austin would have little time for buddy-bonding. Incorrect.

In Aliens in the Attic (2009), the nerdish Tom (Carter Jenkins of Unfabulous and Struck by Lightning) and his hunky cousin Jake (Austin) must work together to save the world from the aliens in the attic.  When Jack is captured, Tom must lead a daring rescue, along with his sister (Ashley Tisdale) and her boyfriend Ricky (Robert Hoffman).  Jake doesn' t display any heterosexual interest, but seems to like Tom quite a lot





More after the break

David Cassidy

The oldest of a show biz family (his brothers are Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan), David Cassidy got his start on The Partridge Family (1970-74), about a family of pop singers who tour the country in a psychedelic bus (Danny Bonaduce played his younger brother). It aired on Friday nights in a block of gay teen "Must See TV," including The Brady Bunch, Room 222, and The Odd Couple.

His character, Keith Partridge, was interested in girls, but never portrayed as a absurdly girl-crazy, like most teenagers on prime-time in the 1970s. And, although pop superstars were presumably dream dates for every girl on earth, Keith frequently encountered girls who disliked pop music, who had never heard of his group, or who simply did not find him attractive. This self-deferential parody, a teen idol who can’t get a date, destabilized the myth of universal heterosexual desire; if some girls are not attracted to Keith, perhaps some boys are.

In “Days of Acne and Roses” (November 1971), Keith teaches a shy delivery boy named Wendell (Jay Ripley) how to date girls. He demonstrates the “yawn, stretch, and arm around” maneuver on Wendell, and then pretends to be a girl so that Wendell can practice his pick-up lines. Keith is remarkably unself-conscious about the physical contact and the mock flirtation, and he is not the least worried about someone overhearing and thinking that he is gay. When most of his fellow television teens recoiled in heart-pounding terror at a buddy’s touch, Keith’s nonchalance seems aggressively gay-friendly.

The teen magazines went wild with shirtless, swimsuit, and towel-shots, revealing David's slim, androgynous body, but in this case they were justified in praising his talent: his music was good.

And gay-friendly.  Songs credited to The Partridge Family (studio musicians except for David and his mother, Shirley Jones) almost entirely eliminated the incessant “girl!” that deadened most bubblegum pop lyrics in the 1970s. In the emblematic “I Think I Love You,” David awakens to the disturbing realization that he is in love:

I just decided to myself, I'd hide it from myself
And never talk about it, and [so I] didn't go and shout it
When you walked in to the room.

Why does he “never talk about it”? Heterosexual teenagers in love do nothing but talk about it. In 1971 I concluded that there must be something more to “a love there is no cure for,” perhaps a love that dares not speak its name.

David’s solo numbers also eliminate almost all gender-specific pronoun or refrainsof “girl!”  For instance in“Where is the Morning,” he laments a failed hookup that could be with either a boy or a girl:

I can’t sleep tonight. I found someone.
You smiled at me and said you were free. And I was alone.

Would you meet me again? 

My friend Derek claimed to have dated him, but David doesn't mention any same-sex relationships in his memoirs, C’mon, Get Happy (1994).

He does graciously acknowledges his appeal to gay boys: “I had a pretty strong gay following. I kind of liked it. Gay publications ran pictures of me; I was named gay pinup of the year by one. I’d get fan letters from gay guys saying things like ‘I can tell by the look in your eyes that you’re one of us.’”

And in a sense, he was “one of us,” an ally, demonstrating that same-sex desire was not only possible, but valid and worthwhile.

David spent most of his later career in Las Vegas, where he wrote songs and performed for audiences of both men and women.  He died in 2017

See also: Derek and the Pop Star.

Joseph and the Amazing Gay Dreamcoat

I'm not a big fan of musicals, but Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1972) is one of my favorites, for three reasons

Reason #1: The utter absence of a hetero-romantic plot, almost unheard-of in musical theater.

It's a Mod version of the picaresque adventures of Joseph (from the Bible), favorite of his father, given a Coat of Many Colors.

His brothers, jealous, set out to kill him, but have a change of heart and sell him to slave traders instead.  He ends up in Egypt -- depicted as a glittery Las Vegas -- as a slave to sleazy merchant Potiphar.

Potiphar's wife tries unsuccessfully to seduce him -- "I don't believe in free love," he yells in 1960s slang.  Or maybe he doesn't particularly care for girls.  

Falsely accused of attempted rape, Joseph is thrown in prison, where he begins interpreting other prisoners' weird dreams, thus drawing the attention of the Pharaoh (an Elvis-like pop star).   Pharaoh makes Joseph his right-hand man. The brothers arrive, and Joseph toys with them a bit before reconciling.

Reason #2:  Pharaoh likes Joseph -- a lot.  Big gay subtext.

Reason #3: Joseph spends most of the play with the Dream Coat off.  And nearly everything else off.  The Pharaoh usually gets an opportunity to flex.

There have been innumerable revivals, in Britain and the U.S., with Joseph played by James Royce Edwards, Paul Jones, David James-Carroll, Bill Hutton, Mike Holoway, David Cassidy, his brother Patrick Cassidy, Jason Donovan, Lee Mead, and Keith Jacks (top photo).  Former teen idol Donny Osmond starred in the 1999 movie version.

But that's not all.  Joseph is a favorite of high school and college theater departments; apparently there have been 20,000 productions since 1972. So you have a good chance of seeing Stars of Tomorrow performing Joseph and the Pharaoh at a little theater near you.

David Cassidy's Comic Book Career

In 1972, when I was 11 years old, David Cassidy was everywhere.

On tv, as Keith Partridge on The Partridge Family.  On Saturday morning cartoons. 

On the radio, where the Partridge Family was still cracking the Top 40, and his own singles were cracking the Top 10.

In 17 paperback novels (The Ghost of Graveyard Hill, Terror By Night, Marked for Terror).

In every teen magazine on the newsstand.

So it made sense that he would push into comic books.  The bargain-basement Charleton Comics, which specialized in cannibalizing other properties, published 14 issues of David Cassidy (1972-73), most with photographs of David on the cover.

Yes, I bought them.

The stories inside were banal, mostly involving David helping a fan, or getting into humorous misadventures on the way to a concert. His fans were portrayed as 100% female.  Men were competitors for girls, manipulating agents, scheming managers, 100% bad guys.

But at least most issues found a way to get David out of his clothes.

By 1973, when David's star was in decline, apparently stories about meeting fans or trying to seduce the one girl in the world who wasn't into him weren't selling well, so the plots moved toward action-adventure, with David meeting spies and pirates.  This says "Outlaws, groovy chicks, and a fiddle bit keep David busy."

A few years later, when his songs were no longer charting, the real-life David also tried to re-invent himself as an action-adventure star with David Cassidy, Man Undercover (1973)..

See also: David Cassidy, Man Undercover; Charlton Comics

Shaun Cassidy: Not Just David Cassidy's Little Brother

Growing up in the shadow of his brother David, Shaun Cassidy began singing at the age of fourteen, but no one took him seriously until, at eighteen, he landed a role as cleancut teen sleuth Joe Hardy in The Hardy Boys Mysteries (1977-79), alongside Parker Stevenson’s Frank. The plots were simple: sleuthing, a touch of danger, followed by jokes and dazzling smiles, with ample swimsuit and shirtless scenes and the camera lingering lovingly on the teenage bodies. Endless teen magazine pin-up spreads followed.

Joe was frequently thrust into peril, tied up in old barns, menaced by madmen, in need of rescuing and subsequent hugging by his older brother or some other hunk. In a two-parter, wealthy rescuer Jocco Halsey (Kevin Brophy), invites Joe to move in with him.

And Joe rarely expressed any interest in girls. In “Campus Terror” (May 1978), guest star Valerie Bertinelli says “I love you,” and Joe responds dryly: "You've had a long day.”   What gay boy could afford to miss such a revelation?

Unlike many Tiger Beat fave raves, Shaun actually had a brief singing career; between 1977 and 1979, his albums went platinum, and his singles topped the charts. A surprising number of his songs were gender-ambiguous, and "You're Using Me" even alluded to a relationship with a boy.

The cover of the album Room Service (1979) shows Shaun in a hotel room, smiling invitingly at the voyeur who peers through the Venetian blinds. The voyeur's gender is ambiguous (though, if you look very carefully, you can see sharp fingernails). Shaun seems to be openly acknowledging the romantic interest of both male and female teens.

 

Teen idol careers are brief. Shaun tried reinventing himself as a hard rocker, complete with leather pants bulge, but still, his star faded by 1980, and he moved into writing and production. He’s been married to women three times, but he (like his brothers David, Patrick, and Ryan) remains a gay ally.

See also: Trying to Escape Church

The Four Cassidy Brothers and the Gay-Friendly 1970s

Speaking of show business dynasties, character actor Jack Cassidy (who starred with Paul Anka in Look in Any Window) married musical theater star Shirley Jones in 1956 (they divorced in 1974).  They had three children of their own. After their divorce in 1974, Shirley Jones married comedian Marty Ingels, who helped her raise the youngest two.

1. David was born to Jack Cassidy and his first wife Evelyn Ward in 1950.  By 1970 he was starring with stepmom Shirley Jones in The Partridge Family (1970-74) and establishing himself as the top teen idol of his generation.  But he also did some tv and movie work, including his own series, David Cassidy: Man Undercover (1978-79).


2. Shaun, born in 1958, became a tv star of his own in the gay-subtext Hardy Boys Mysteries (1977-79).  He also had a teen idol career before becoming a writer, director, and producer.

3.Born in 1962, Patrick began his acting career in the anti-drug cautionary tale Angel Dusted (1981), and played gay characters twice: a West Point cadet in Dress Gray (1986), and an actor with AIDS in Longtime Companion (1989).  He is still involved in raising consciousness about AIDS.


 He's appeared in lots of other tv series and tv movies, including two versions of the Superman myth: he played the villainous Leslie Luckinbill in three episodes of Lois and Clark (1996) and Henry Small, the father of Superboy's girlfriend Lana Lang, on Smallville (2002-2003).

On stage, he got to display his physique in two renditions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.  He's also been in The Music Man, Annie Get Your Gun, Camelot, and 42nd Street.

4, Ryan, born in 1966 (bottom, with his mother, Patrick, and Shaun), wasn't interested in an acting career.

But he guest starred on three episodes of The Facts of Life (1985) with Mackenzie Astin (left) which made the teen magazines go wild  -- and in the buddy-bonding Jesse Hawkes (1989) with several other celebrity kids, including Chad McQueen, Ethan Wayne, and Ramon Sheen.  Then he moved behind the scenes as a set designer.

See also: David Cassidy.

David Cassidy: Man Undercover

Teen idol careers are painfully short, 3 or 4 years.  The 12 year olds who discover your picture in Teen Beat and moon over your bubblegum pop will eventually turn into teenagers, start dating boys of their own, and relegate you to childhood memories.  Unless you can reinvent yourself as a adult performer, you've had it.

David Cassidy, whose last charting single was in 1972 in the U.S. (though he was still selling records in Germany and the U.K.), tried to reinvent himself as a serious dramatic actor.  In 1978, he played a cop who goes undercover as a high school student in "A Chance to Live", an episode of Police Story.

He was nominated for an Emmy, and NBC was so impressed that they created a series for his character, giving undercover cop Dan Shay (David) a wife, a daughter, and a superior officer to butt heads with (Simon Oakland as Sgt. Abrams).

Unfortunately, they didn't learn from the example of Bobby Sherman in Getting Together.  They made a lot of mistakes.

Mistake #1: The title.  Everybody thought that David would be playing himself, a sort of teen idol secret agent.

Mistake #2: the wife and kids. Teen idols should be single, so the fans can fantasize about getting them for themselves.

Mistake #3: his costumes. All tight jeans and shirts unbuttoned to the navel.  It was the style in 1978, and it was nice to see a basket, but it didn't mesh with the androgynous shoulder-length hair.

Mistake #4: the middle aged superior officer (Simon Oakland).  Too hippie vs. establishment for the 1978.  Dan should have had a peer partner.

Mistake #5: instead of going undercover in a high school, Dan went undercover as a different ludicrous character every week, to snoop out a different ludicrous crime.  See if you can tell which is which:

He went undercover as a: biker, college student, drifter, high school student, hot rodder, junkie, medical patient, pimp, prisoner, trucker, weapons buyer.

To crack the crime of: baby selling, biker gang, drugs, homicide (several times), and supermarket break-ins.

Mistakes #6 and #7: Premiering it on Thursday nights, opposite the youth-hits Barney Miller and Soap, in November, when everyone is too busy preparing for the holidays to try out new tv shows.

Eight episodes aired during the Thanksgiving-Christmas season 1978, and another two were burned off in the summer of 1979, and David Cassidy: Man Undercover went into the records of "worst series ever."

David Cassidy found the experience painful.  After 1979 he concentrated on his music, and limited his tv and film work to occasional guest star spots. Recently he starred in Ruby and the Rockits with his brother Patrick and current teen idol Austin Butler.

See also: David Cassidy's Comic Book Career

Paul Anka: The Gay Next Door

Paul Anka was the first teen idol to be known for his physique as well as his music.  Other teen idols of the 1950s -- Bobby Rydell, Bobby Darin, Ricky Nelson, Pat Boone -- may have been dreamy, but the teen magazines emphasized their cool threads, not their muscular chests. Paul not only had a face and a voice, he had a body, and he knew how to use it to his advantage.

His first single, "Diana," hit the top of the charts in 1957,  pushing hits by Jerry Lane Lewis and Elvis Presley out of the way.  "Puppy Love," "Put Your Head on My Shoulder," and "Lonely Boy" followed, all chart toppers, mostly about lost or unrequited love.








In the early 1960s, as the British invasion limited the appeal of the 1950s-era teen idols, Paul re-invented himself as an adult contemporary performer, and continued to enjoy a string of hits: "In the Still of the Night," "You're Having My Baby," "One Man Woman."

And he made movies that required more underwear, swimsuit, and semi-nude shots than any other teen idol of the era.  Look in Any Window (1961) is particularly memorable.

Craig Fowler (Paul), the teenage son of dysfunctional parents, has a paralyzing "sexual abnormality."  He goes to a youth center and ogles the buffed athletes working out.

Then he spies on his hunky neighbor (Jack Cassidy, David Cassidy's dad), kissing his wife in the swimming pool.

Meanwhile rumors of his sexual deviance run through the neighborhood.  Two teenage boys chase him, yelling threats, and the cops are on his trail.  "Let me get my hands on any guy that isn't normal!" one grunts.

Craig tries to pursue a "normal" life by courting girl-next-door Ellen (Gigi Perreau), but eventually even "true love" can't repress his aberrant desires.

Nope, Craig's not gay -- that would have been too controversial for Hollywood in 1961. There are still almost no gay teenagers in mainstream film.  Craig's a Peeping Tom.  But the gay symbolism is obvious.

Assumed gay in real life, Paul was actually heterosexual, though he was friends with gay teen idol Sal Mineo and bisexual Rat Packer Sammy Davis Jr..

Danny Bonaduce

Keith (David Cassidy) was the fave rave of The Partridge Family (1970-74), the Boomer sitcom about a family of pop stars driving around on a psychedelic bus.  But Danny (right) had a following among the younger gay kids.  Played by the carrot-top, freckle-faced Danny Bonaduce, he was a fast-talking operator who kept trying to get the family into bigger and better gigs.

Here's a "Where's Waldo" scene of Danny immersed in a sea of interracial hunks when he is drafted by mistake.

Boomers with fond memories of Danny Partridge are shocked by Danny Bonaduce today, craggy, gravelly-voiced, a shock jock, celebrity wrestler, and general rabble rouser with multiple arrests on his record (including an arrest for assaulting a transvestite prostitute)  Plus a shockingly muscular physique.

The shock may come from low exposure Danny had during his adolescence and young adulthood, so we seemed to jump directly from freckle-faced operator to craggy and gravelly.

But he wasn't entirely under the radar during the 1970s.  The teenager had guest spots on Shazam!, Fantasy Island, Chips, California Fever, and Eight is Enough, and performed in Murder on Flight 501 (1975), the buddy-bonding movie Corvette Summer (1978) with Mark Hamill, and the sexploitation H.O.T.S. (1979).  By 1980, however, Former Child Star Syndrome had taken its toll, leading Danny to drug addiction and a period of homelessness.

He began re-inventing himself in the early 2000s, with a radio career, a reality tv series, and lots of well-publicized celebrity stunts (in 2003, for instance, he boxed fellow teen idol Barry Williams)..  He's not exactly gay-friendly, but then he doesn't seem to be friendly to anyone in particular.