Threatened and Threatening Gay Kids

The early 1960s were all about children.  Two of three households in the United States contained children under age 18.  Entire neighborhoods were occupied by families with young children, with occasional elderly or childless couples (adults who lived alone were practically unheard of, and suspect).

31% of the U.S. population was under the age of fifteen, and 12% was under age five.   There were more elementary and high school students than ever before in history, and the number was increasing every year.  There were 1,393,000 teachers and 64,000 principals, the highest number ever.   Educational theory was big business.

The mental and emotional health of children was also a big business. Childhood was laden with infinite perils.  One false move -- a word said or left unsaid, a punishment too lenient or too severe, a hug or the lack of a hug, a school trip forbidden or allowed -- and the child would be sent careening into homicidal madness, or turn gay (which, in the mindset of the 1960s, was about the same thing).

Many movies and tv programs of the era involved kids with an aberrant sexuality being threatened or threatening the adults.

On a 1960 episode of The Twilight Zone, Billy Mumy, soon to star on Lost in Space, plays a boy who can do anything.  What he does is  force people to obey his every whim.  Rebellion results in symbolic castration or death.  "You had him!" one of the townsfolk complains to his mother before trying to kill him. "You had to go and have him!"  

In Let’s Kill Uncle (1966), oddball outsider (that is, gay) Barnaby Harrison (Pat Cardi, who would go on to star on It's About Time) is heir to the family fortune, so his evil uncle tries to kill him.  Since no adults believe him, he fights back in the only way he can think of: he and a gal pal try to kill Uncle back.

The Gay Rights Movement didn't change the myth of the evil gay kid.  By the 1970s, threatening or threatened aberrant sexuality was everywhere. Lee H. Montgomery and Mark Lester made their careers playing sexual outsiders who plot murder or are murder victims.

In Bad Ronald (1974) Scott Jacoby plays a mother-obsessed (that is, gay) sexual outsider who wants a girlfriend, but nevertheless kidnaps and fondles the hunky Duane (Teddy Eccles).

In The Kid and the Killers (1974), oddball outsider (that is, gay) Miguel (Gerry Ross) wants revenge on the men who killed his sister, so he approaches a bounty hunter named Roper (Jon Cypher). After torturing and trying to kill him, Roper agrees to help, but his disgust at Miguel's increasingly overt displays of homoerotic interest almost compels him to abandon the mission.

Mark Lester after Oliver

Every kid I knew was forced to see Oliver! in 1968.  Our parents had the impression that musicals were somehow educational, and besides, it was Dickens.

Most of the kids I knew disliked it.  After all, it was a musical. About child abuse, domestic violence, and other fun stuff.   I found the heterosexist "true love" plot boring, but I liked the buddy-bonding between the streetwise Artful Dodger (15-year old Jack Wild) and the cherubic innocent Oliver (10-year old Mark Lester, left).

I followed Jack Wild onto H. R. Pufnstuf, but I heard nothing more about Mark Lester for many years. During the early 2000s, I was writing an article on demonic children in the movies, and I found that the cherub spent his pubescence playing violent or creepy, or both.  His characters seemed uncomfortable with their bodies, ravaged by uncontrollable desires, and obsessively heterosexual.

In Eyewitness (1970), also released as Sudden Terror, 12-year old Ziggy (Mark) witnesses a murder on the Mediterranean island of Malta,  and is pursued by the killer.  He goes on the lam, along with his girlfriend.

In Melody (1971), 10-year old Daniel (Mark) falls in love with a girl and decides to marry her. The adults disapprove of a 10-year old getting married, but it's the heart of the counterculture, and "true love" is always right.

In What the Peeper Saw (1972), also released as Night Hair Child and Diabolica malicia, 14-year old Marcus (Mark) is sexually attracted to his father's new wife (Britt Eklund).  She shares his interest, and they have sex. They conspire to kill Dad so they can be together. But is she really conspiring to kill Marcus? 

In Who Slew Auntie Roo (1972), 14-year old Christopher (Mark)  tries to rescue his sister from the demented Mrs. Forrest (Shelley Winters), who is holding her prisoner in the attic. 

Love Under the Elms (1975) was originally titled La prima volta sull' erba, "the first time on the grass." While visiting Italy, Mark meets a girl, and they have sex a lot. It ends badly, but if you want to see frontal nudity, this is the one.

Not many gay kids saw these movies -- they were all rated R for violence and sex

Mark strips down to a swimsuit or his underwear, or is accosted in the bathtub, in all of his violent/creepy movies, but with all the heterosexual longing going on, there's not much time for homoerotic subtexts. After Oliver!, I found one only in Senza ragione (1973), also known as Redneck. 

Lennox (Mark)  is kidnapped by two crooks, the evil Memphis (Telly Savalas) and the hunky Mosquito (Franco Nero, left).   Lennox bonds with Mosquito and they run away together, and spend the night, with rear nudity and a strong implication of sex between them.  But does Lennox really like the gangster, or is he plotting?  It ends badly.

Mark Lester also starred in some costume dramas that didn't require creepy sexuality.  He retired from acting in 1977, studied osteopathy, and opened an acupuncture clinic in England.  

Batman and the Boy Wonder

The Batman tv series (1966-68), like The Adventures of Superman and  The Green Hornet (1966-67) was based on a long-standing comic book series.  But only loosely. The characters were the same -- superhero with no superpowers Batman/Bruce Wayne (Adam West), his teen sidekick Robin/Dick Grayson (Burt Ward), butler Alfred, police chief Gordon, even some of the villains -- Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Louie the Lilac (played by comedy legend Milton Berle). But they infused their characters with a "gee-gosh" earnestness that the hippie generation found hilarious.

Playing along, the producers came up with crazier and crazier villains, as famous actors lined up for guest villain spots -- Cliff Robertson as "Shame," Vincent Price as "Egghead," Roddy McDowell as "Bookworm," William Smith as "Adonis."  Boxer Jerry Quarry played a boxer.





And the predicaments that the Dynamic Duo got into during their weekly cliffhangers became more and more ludicrous.  But what gay kid noticed, or cared?  They were tied up and struggling, muscles were straining, and you had to wait a whole 24 hours to see what clever -- or exceptionally lucky -- strategy they would use to escape.

Sometimes Robin was tied up alone, and Batman had to rush to the rescue, providing a "my hero" moment and the only buddy-bonding.  Otherwise Dick and Bruce were aggressively portrayed as adopted father and son, not as boyfriends, as they had been in the original comic stories (why, precisely, do they sleep in the same bed in a 100-room mansion, or need a cold shower afterwards)?

But what gay kid was paying attention?  Both Adam West and Burt Ward were pleasantly muscular.


















And both Burt Ward and Frank Gorshin, who played the Riddler, had extra advantages -- jaw-droppingly obvious even to kids -- that rivaled the enormity of Rupert Grint, 30 years later.  After the first season, complaints from the Catholic League of Decency forced them to tape it down.



Burt's  autobiography, Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights, describes his endowment in intimate detail, and it's also discussed in the Batman biopic starring Jason Marsden, but gay men who had grown up with him were already quite aware.  They had missed the plot details of any number of episodes because it took up the entire tv screen.

See also: Lane's Celebrity Date

Ike Eisenmann: Beefcake Summer

Ike Eisenmann has had a long career in acting, production, and voice work, but for gay boys growing up in the 1970s, he was famous for this scene:


Before 1978, he was a child actor, cute if a bit scruffy, doing guest roles on tv (Mannix, Gunsmoke, SWAT) and in tv-movies requiring country boys with Texas accents, mostly airing on After-School Specials.  He didn't quite make it as a Disney Adventure Boy, like Jeff East or Kurt Russell, but he appeared in a few Disney movies.

In Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), the 12 year old played Tony,  a gay-coded "kid with a secret"; he and his sister Tia (Kim Darby) are aliens.  Of the magical power variety: Tony is telekinetic, and Tia can open locked doors (useful if you've lost your key, or if you've been kidnapped).  They are trying to reach Witch Mountain to reunite with their people while an evil industrialist tries to capture them to make money from their powers.

Then came the sequel, Return from Witch Mountan (1978), with scenery-chomping Bette Davis as a new evil industrialist.  Except Tony is now 15, well into adolescence, and his lack of interest in girls is striking in an era of incessant teenage girl-craziness.  And if the gay-coding isn't enough, there is an extensive scene in which the shirtless, hypnotized Tony stands around with his small but firm muscles on display.  During the 1970s, shirtless shots were almost unheard of in Disney movies, but here it was, plain as day, for a good five minutes, with no plot justification whatsoever.

In the era before DVDs, some gay boys saw the movie five or six times, just so they could memorize that scene.


Ike has continued to act and do voice work. He had a memorable role as a racist teen who has a change of heart (and wore extra-tight jeans) on The Jeffersons (watch the complete episode here).   In 2009 he wrote and directed a tv series called The Chefsters, about people with names like Scrub B. Pots and Chefona Kitchens teaching proper nutrition.  But gay men who were children in the 1970s will always remember that bright spring day in March 1978.

The Goldenboy in the Attic: Jeb Stuart Adams

There are lots of threatened gay-vague kids in movies and tv, but not many are threatened by their own parents.  Flowers in the Attic (1987) is an exception.  It was based on a 1979 novel by Virginia Andrews, about four children who go to live with their grandmother because their mother doesn't like them.  But Grandma doesn't like them either; she locks them in the attic for several years, and finally tries to poison them.  The eldest two, Chris and Cathy, develop an incestuous romance.

The movie omits the incest, thus omitting any hint of heterosexual interest, transforming Chris (Jeb Stuart Adams) into a gay-vague teenager.  Grandma (Louise Fletcher) struts around with a Bible, accusing Chris and the other kids of "sin," which of course adds to the gay symbolism.

The incest angle, murderous relatives, and some nasty plot elements made the film controversial, but it didn't help Jeb's career.

Blond goldenboy Jeb Stuart Adam looked like he sprang up from the Appalachia of the Dukes of Hazzard, but he was actually the son of gay actor Nick Adams and his wife, Carol Nugent, and he grew up among the Hollywood glitterati.

His angelic smile and a smooth, firm but not muscular chest, making him perfect for roles as threatened kids: threatened by drug dealers on Quincy ME (1982),  a bad father in His Mistress (1984), and a hippie cult on Airwolf (1985).


He also had significant supporting roles in The Goonies and Once Bitten, plus a 7-episode story arc (1977-78) on Baa Baa Black Sheep, about World War II fighter pilots led by Pappy Boyington (Robert Conrad).

After Flowers in the Attic, Jeb was threatened a few more times, in They Live (1988), Dragnet (1990), and Sworn to Vengeance (1993), but you can't play threatened kids forever. He retired from acting and moved into production design and stuntwork.

Today Jeb has a successful real estate business in Ventura, California, specializing in the million-plus market.

You'd Be Perfect for My Grandson: Inner Sanctum

Authorial intent is not necessary for a gay subtext, but since about 1980, subtexts have usually been the result of actors, directors, or writers recognizing the gay potential in ostensibly heterosexual characters, and playing into it.  Before 1980, subtexts were usually the result of of actors, directors, or writers being unaware that same-sex desire, behavior, or romance existed.  Sometimes they were so utterly ignorant that it is mind-boggling.

Inner Sanctum (1948) is a thriller about an ordinary man, Harold Dunlap (Charles Russell), who accidentally kills his fiancee during an argument at a train station, then goes on the lam in a small town.  He ends up at a boarding house run by the elderly Thelma Mitchell (Nana Bryant) and occupied by the usual colorful small-town characters: a drunk, a failed doctor, a busybody, a sultry seductress -- and Thelma's daughter and grandson. Mike (Dale Belding) is a teenager who desperately wants to escape his small town hell -- and looks heavily embarrassed at being forced to wear a little kid's whirly-top beanie.

When Harold arrives, Thelma aggressively tries to push him into having sex with her grandson: "Oh, you must meet Mike!  Oh, you're just the kind of man he needs!  You must stay in his room tonight!"  Apprised that Mike's room has only a small single bed, she grins knowingly: "Oh, they'll manage!"

But she relents and permits a second rollaway bed to be installed.

I can't think of a good "real" explanation for Thelma's giddy match-making. A masculine role model?

Once they are in the bedroom, Harold undresses, giving us chest and basket shots unusual in film noir.  Mike stares wide-eyed.

"You want to see me with my shirt off?" Harold asks. Mike nods. "Well, come on, have a look."  Mike moves across the room, sits next to the underwear-clad Harold, and examines his muscles.

Ok, maybe Mike saw the accident earlier, and he wants to examine Harold's muscles to see if there's a telltale scar. But it looks very much like a gay teenager negotiating a crush on an older man.

Harold realizes that Mike knows too much, and decides to kill him.  As they struggle, the tenants downstairs hear curious bumping noises from the bedroom, and wonder what's going on.  "Oh, I'm sure they're all right," Thelma says with her knowing grin.

I have no "real" explanation for what she thinks is going on.

The movie ends with Mike saved and Harold turning himself in, and viewers scratching their heads, asking "Was it possible for anyone to be so completely unaware, even in 1948?"

Maybe not.  There's not much information on Charles Russell or Dale Belding, but Nana Bryant, a seasoned theatrical actress, was certainly aware of the existence of gay people, and director Lew Landers often made movies with homoerotic subtexts.

You can watch the entire movie on youtube.

The Jacoby Boys

There were three Jacoby boys in Hollywood during the Boomer generation, half-brothers (plus their two sisters).

1.  Scott (born in 1956) was the serious actor, specializing in weird, quirky movies, such as Bad Ronald (1974), in which a boy hides in the crawlspaces of his house after his mother dies and terrorizes the new family that moves in (including the hunky Ted Eccles), or The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976), in which a handicapped boy befriends a girl (Jodie Foster) who lives all by herself after her father's death.

He played a teenager who discovers that his father is gay in That Certain Summer (1973).  Hal Holbrook played his father, and Martin Sheen his father's lover.

In spite of the quirkiness, there was plenty of room for shirtless and underwear shots.

His characters were always heterosexual, but the "quirky romance" still had queer resonances that appealed to gay teens.

Scott  still acts occasionally, and he owns a recording studio in Hollywood.

2. Billy born in 1969, was the hunk.  After a few horror films, he played girl-crazy teenagers who don't seem to own shirts in Just One of the Guys (1985) and Party Camp (1987).  His characters were heterosexual, too, but -- odd for 1980s teen movies -- not homophobic.

He also played Blanche's grandson on The Golden Girls.

Billy was probably best known for his role as wannabe thug Mikey, who wore a leather jacket and skin-tight jeans on the tv series Parker Lewis Can't Lose (1990-1993).



Today, as Billy Jayne, he is well-known in the business as a commercial director.  

3. The baby of the family, Bobby (born in 1973), was the wise-guy.  He started out in tear-jerker movies of the week, then moved into thrillers like Tremors (1990) and Night of the Demons 2 (1994).  He was also busy in television, starring on Knots Landing (1980-85) and, as a young adult, on MTV's Undressed (2000-2001).  Not a lot of beefcake shots, except on Undressed, which apparently existed solely to film attractive young people in their underwear.

Today, as Robert Jayne, he works as a professional gambler, specializing in black jack.

The First Bad Kid: Barry Gordon

In 1954, the six-year old Barry Gordon made the scene with a hit single, "I'm Getting Nuttin' for Christmas (because I've been nuttin' but bad)":

I broke my bat on Johnny's head;
I hid a frog in sister's bed;
I spilled some ink on Mommy's rug;
Bought some gum with a penny slug;
Somebody snitched on me.

Far more mischievous than Dennis the Menace or Peck's Bad Boy of the 1920s, he was a humorous precursor to the threatened and threatening kids whom the adults would fear through the 1960s.

You couldn't have a kid miss out on Christmas forever, so they made him record "I Like Christmas" in 1955.  He recorded several other singles and albums, with songs like "Rock Around Mother Goose" and "I Can't Whistle."



In the 1960s he made the rounds of tv guest spots: Leave It to Beaver, Davis the Menace, Make Room for Daddy, Jack Benny, and Love American Style (in the episode "Love and the High School Flop-Out").  Why is he sitting with his hands like that?










He made many movies, including Hands of a Stranger, Pressure Point, The Spirit is Willing, and Out of It (1969), in which a high school brain (Barry) buddy-bonds with a jock (John Voight).

He was nominated for a Tony for his performance in the Broadway play A Thousand Clowns (adapted for film in 1965), as a gay-vague teenager crushed when his free-spirit guardian (Jason Robards) caves to the establishment.

Barry never got to play romantic leads, but he played a lot of nebbishes, homoromantic best friends, and next-door neighbors in comedy and sci-fi. In voice work, he played Donatello in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Nestles Quick Bunny, and the Honeynut Cheerios Bee.

More recently he has played an impressive line of lawyers, doctors, rabbis, and sundry authority figures.

After serving as the longest-running president of the Screen Actors Guild in history and running for Congress twice, Barry settled down as a radio commentator (From Left Field,  Left Talk with Barry Gordon) where he gives his progressive viewpoint on everything from healthcare reform to gay marriage.

Jesse Bradford

Born in 1979, Jesse Bradford made his acting debut at the age of 8 months, in a Q-Tips commercial (it was a non-speaking role).  He was busy as a child, playing the son of a screenwriter with lung cancer in The Boys (1991) and brother of a psychotic gay kid (Harley Cross) in The Boy Who Cried Bitch (1991).

But he first made an impression on gay teens with Far from Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog (1995), where his Angus is lost in the Canadian wilderness with a dog named Yellow, fights for survival, and takes his shirt off, revealing a hard, firm but not muscular chest.

Unfortunately, his teenage projects involved a lot of girls.  In Hackers (1995), teenage computer whizzes Joey (Jesse) and The Girl try to save the world from a dangerous computer virus, and in Clockstoppers (2002), Zack (Jesse) and The Girl find a device that allows them to move super-fast, in effect stopping time.

But his darkly handsome teen idol face was sure to elicit swoons from gay and straight teens, and he became more muscular every year.

The thriller Swimfan (2002) is about a psychotic girl who stalks Ben (Jesse), a high school swimmer.  Though he is heterosexual, the disdain he feels as the girl becomes more and more insistent in her desire to be with him can be read as a gay subtext.  And  fans got to see Jesse in a revealing swimsuit.

Some buddy bonding: his character likes Romeo (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Romeo+Juliet (1996), and bonds with the gay male cheerleader Wes (Huntley Ritter) in Bring it On (2000).  In Flags of Our Fathers (2006), his Rene Gagnon storms the beach at Iwo Jima while mooning over Doc Bradley (Ryan Philippe).

After playing a gay hustler in Speedway Junky (1999), with Jonathan Taylor Thomas as his bisexual colleague, Jesse turned down a gay role in The Rule of Attraction (2002), fearing that he would be typecast.

But he played gay again in The Heights (2005), a young actor whom the engaged Jonathan (James Marsden) meets, falls for, and kisses.

Jesse's most recent roles have involved young adult heterosexuals negotiating relationships: a driven young attorney in Outlaw (2010),  a guy in love with a single mom in Other People's Kids (2011), a single dad in Guys with Kids (2012).  But he remains a gay ally.

Willie Wonka and the Torture Factory

Name a movie that about a lavender-coated, gay-vague monster who lures five children into his lair with the promise of candy, then tortures and terrorizes them, killing three, before inviting the one he deems "good" to become his apprentice.

No, it's not Nightmare on Elm Street.  But you were close.

It's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a early entry in the torture-porn genre that parents inflicted on Boomer kids in the summer of 1971, causing not a few of them to be traumatized for life.  I still can't hear the song "Candy Man" without cringing.

The plot: Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder), the ultimate capitalist, produces candy for the town.  He offers a free tour of his factory to five kids who win a "golden ticket." Once they arrive, he terrorizes them.

He pretends to be disabled, and once they become adequately solicitious, does a somersault: "See, you were all sympathetic for nothing!  I'm really not disabled!"

What a nasty thing to do!

Even a boat trip down a chocolate river provides an excuse for Willie to toy with their emotions.  He starts shrieking:

Not a speck of light is showing, so the danger must be growing
Are the fires of Hell a-glowing? Is the grisly reaper mowing?

Oh, please -- they're just going to another part of the factory!

But then, he is always extremely volatile, level-head one moment, screaming the next.

Willy arranges for the children to be killed or transformed into something monstrous in retribution for some minor fault, like Billy Mumy's godlike demon in "It's a Good Life."

1. The tv-obsessed Mike Teevee (Paris Themmen) is shrunk to the size of a tv image.
2. The bratty Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole) falls down a garbage chute  into the furnace, where she is burned to death.
3.  The gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde (Denise Nickerson) is transformed into a giant blueberry, whereupon she explodes.
4. The gluttonous Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner) drowns in a river of chocolate.

 After they are murdered, Willy's slaves, the Oompa-Loompas, sing moralizing songs: if you refrain from chewing gum, over eating, being bratty, and watching tv, you'll "go far," like survive to the end of the torture factory tour.


Charlie (Peter Ostrum) is one of the irrepressibly good, blond waifs who populate adult fantasies about childhood innocence (others include Mark Lester, Jeremy Sumpter, Macaulay Culkin, and Ricky Schroeder).  He has an extremely creepy home life, living with four grandparents who are all bedridden -- and share the same bed.  Gross!

Charlie's fault is larceny -- he and one of his grandfathers sneak into a secret lab and steal an experimental soft drink.  But Willy just yells at Charlie instead of torturing him -- maybe he has a thing for blonds -- and the end offers to make him his apprentice torturer.

I guess even Freddy Krueger needed an assistant.

This was supposed to be fun?  No wonder most of the child stars never acted on film again.
Peter Ostrum is now a veterinarian in New York.
Michael Bollner is a tax accountant in his native Germany.
Julie Dawn Cole limits herself to television.
Paris Themmen works in live theater and film. production.
Even Peter Stewart, who played one of Charlie's friends in town, never acted again.

Would you?

Grandmother's House: Gay Kid Saves The Day

Threatened gay-vague kids were surprisingly popular during the 1980s.  Lee H. Montgomery in Night Shadows, Harley Cross in The Believers, Jeb Adams in Flowers in the Attic, the kids of Clownhouse.   But no one was more threatened, or more gay-vague, than Eric Foster:

1. Death House (1987), aka Zombie Death House, directed by action star John Saxon: the inmates at a federal prison go zombie, break out, and terrorize Luke Hagen (Eric).

2. Cry Wilderness (1987): a Bigfoot kidnaps Paul Cooper (Eric), but turns out to be nice.  He's really terrorized by an escaped tiger.

3. Dark Room (1988): Abused Perry (Eric) grows up to be a psycho-killer (played by Aarin Teich).

4. Grandmother's House (1989).  After their Dad dies, David (Eric) and his older brother Lynn (Kim Valentine) must live with their grandparents.  Grandpa is played with threatening intensity by Len Lesser, Uncle Leo on Seinfeld, left.  Grandma is played by Ida Lee.

During the 1980s Satanic ritual abuse panic, even relatives had hidden secrets and malicious motives, and David soon realizes that something is wrong.  Bodies are found in the neighborhood.

By this point, Eric was fourteen or fifteen, with feminine mannerisms that marked him as gay, especially when David hangs out at a public pool, grooving on the teenage boys.  He buddy-bonds with a teenage hunk named Raymond.

They see Grandpa carrying a body into the basement.  They catch glimpses of a lady with a butcher knife and a crazy smile.  David calls the police, but no one believes him.  Then the lady traps them in the house.

Guess what?  It's not Grandma.

Let's review: nuclear families are evil and threatening.  But the gay-vague kid saves the day.

 Eric was having a pubescent growth spurt, so in some scenes the actor is an inch taller and his voice has deepened.

Apparently four movies were enough.  After a few episodes as a high school kid on The Wonder Years, he retired from show business.

Bless the Beasts and Children

When I was a kid, our church forbade going to movies, but a combination of factors (a babysitting uncle, an adventurous friend, increased freedom) led to me seeing a lot during the summer and fall of 1971: The Million Dollar Duck, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, The Omega Man, The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight, and Bless the Beasts and Children, an early example of the "shirtless teens working together" genre (others include Toy Soldiers, White Water Summer, and White Squall). But I found it painful to watch, and I haven't seen it since.

It stars a group of misfit teens at a summer camp, bullied by the others, ostracized as "The Bedwetters." They all have problems with distant, abusive, over-achieving, or absent parents (another of the establishment vs. youth plotlines of the hippie generation).
Counselor Cotton (Barry Robins, center)
Violent juvenile delinquent Teft (Billy Mumy of The Twilight Zone and Lost in Space).
Overweight Shecker (Miles Chapin, right)






The antisocial brothers Lally 1 (Marc Vahanian, right) and Lally 2 (Bob Kramer)
Shy, introverted Goodenow (Darel Glaser)

When they discover that a herd of buffalo at a nearby preserve will be hunted and killed, the Bedwetters decide to take action.  In 1971, during the heart of the Vietnam War, we couldn't miss the parallel between hunting buffalo and the parents' attempts to destroy the boys.

There is some buddy-bonding between Cotton and Teft, but usually the boys act as a group.

They even sleep together in a mass of entwined bodies.

The boys in Bless the Beasts and Children are not nearly as muscular as those in White Squall or Toy Soldiers; they are children, soft and vulnerable, in need of protection and nurturing, not objects of desire.

The many shirtless and semi-nude shots -- underwear so revealing that you literally see everything -- have been criticized as inappropriately erotic, but actually they add to the sadness of the movie. We see not only who the boys are now, but who they could become -- strong, powerful, potent -- endless human potential destroyed.

Only Bill Mumy and Marc Vahanian are still active in show business (Bill primarily as a singer). Barry Robins, who was gay in real life, died in 1986.  Miles Chapin is now an environmental activist and writer.