Gangster's Boy: Jackie Cooper Falls in Love

Born September 15th, 1922, the blond, pug-faced Jackie Cooper (left, with Freddie Bartholomew and Mickey Rooney) was the Ricky Schroder of his generation.  He got his start in Skippy, an adaptation of the comic strip about kids and dogs and the lunacy of adult society.  Jackie’s ability to shed realistic tears on cue (augmented by authoritarian directing: Taurog threatened to shoot his dog if he failed to deliver) won him a Best Actor Oscar nomination and catapulted him into the ranks of Hollywood royalty.  Sooky, The Champ, When a Fellow Needs a Friend, and Treasure Island followed, all box-office toppers.  By 1934 Jackie had his own fan magazine, half a dozen Big-Little book titles, and enough advertising tie-ins to shame Little Orphan Annie.

When Jackie hit pubescence, his box office draws declined, he re-invented himself la hard, masculine boys’ book hero.  He spent hundreds of hours at the gym, becoming an expert boxer, wrestler, and swimmer.  Movie magazines published photos of him in boxing trunks or skimpy swimsuits, displaying a hard-packed muscularity that made adult beefcake star John Garfield look downright scrawny.  Boys and men rarely appeared shirtless on camera in the 1930s, so instead Jackie wore tight dark-colored t-shirts that accentuated his v-shaped torso and mountainous biceps.

But even with a stunning boys’ book physique, he had become so thoroughly promoted as vulnerable, sensitive, and clingy that audiences simply wouldn’t accept him as tough, not even tough as a façade to hide a sensitive soul, so he was still asked to make with the waterworks in every picture.  And his pictures always featured gay subtexts, sometimes with heterosexual competition.

In Gangster’s Boy (1938),  Jackie plays Larry Kelly, a whiz-kid valedictorian, a letterman in every sport, yet also a fun-loving regular fella: he drives a jalopy covered with graffiti, plays the drums in a swing band, and litters his speech with goofy  expressions like “Who do you think you are?  Anyhow?”


He is stunningly attractive, so thoroughly desired by the guys, gals, teachers, and townsfolk that they always look like they want to rip his clothes off, but he is devoted to his long-term “particular friend,” Bill Davis (future Broadway star Tommy Wonder).  “We’ll always be together,” Larry exclaims in a tender moment, and indeed after their high school graduation they plan to enroll at West Point together.

When Larry stars dating a girl, Bill seems to resent the competition: every time Larry swoops in for a kiss, he finds some excuse to interrupt them. He claims that pictures of girls are not allowed in cadets’ lockers at West Point: “You’re not supposed to waste time thinking about girls. . .you’ve got important things to think about!”  This may or not be true, but Larry does not challenge him.

The somewhat strained romance is further interrupted when Larry’s father, Knuckles, returns from an extended “business trip” up the river and confesses that he is actually a reformed gangster, just released from prison (perhaps the name “Knuckles” should have provided a clue).

When the townsfolk discover the terrible secret, they turn into slathering bigots.  No gangster’s son has the right to sully their town: they kick Larry out of the nightclub where he’s performing, refuse to applaud after his valedictory speech, and forbid their children from seeing him.  On the night of the Big Dance, Bill and his sister both sneak out of the house to see Larry, positioning themselves both as “dates,” as competitors for his affection.  But then the sister is forgotten, and the rest of the movie maintains the gay romance.

Driving home from the Big Dance, they accidentally hit and injure a small child.  Bill was at the wheel, but Larry claims responsibility, recognizing that an arrest for reckless driving will ruin either of their chances of being admitted to West Point.  But Bill is unwilling to let Larry sacrifice his career.

They posture and argue about who will take the blame until the judge uncovers the truth and exonerates them both, intoning that they have “learned a lot about friendship.”  But really it is the adults who have learned a lot. Larry and Bill already knew that they were ready to fight and die for each other, that their bond far transcended any momentary flirtation with girls.  Instead of a heteronormative clinch, the movie ends with the boys gazing at each other with eye-shimmering affection.

Within the Hollywood community, there was considerable speculation that the teenage Jackie’s sensitivity and his many friendships with girls signified that he was gay.  Whispered “anecdotes” had Jackie and former costar Wallace Beery caught with their pants down, and once at a nightclub, brash blue comedian Milton Berle spotlighted him as a “fag”, to gales of humiliating laughter.  These jokes and rumors apparently had a profound effect on Jackie.  In his later years, in spite of his otherwise liberal politics, he has made some mildly homophobic statements,  and he has never formed a close friendship with a man, perhaps out of a fear of what masculine intimacy might signify.

More Nutcracker Beefcake

When I was a kid, our church forbade movies, theater, carnivals, circuses -- basically anything that had a plot.  And my working-class parents disapproved of anything "long hair."  So ballet and opera were completely alien.

Except at Christmastime, when we would go to see "The Nutcracker" at Centennial Hall on the Augustana College campus, or at Rock Island High School, or both.  One year the Youth Symphony participated, so I got to be in the orchestra pit for eight full performances.

The plot is heterosexist -- Elsa receives a nutcracker shaped like a toy soldier for Christmas.  He comes to life, fights an army of mice, and reveals that he is actually a prince.  They return to his kingdom, the Land of Sweets, where he makes Elsa his queen.

But who pays attention to the plot?  No matter what people tell you, they go to ballets for one reason, and one reason only: to celebrate male or female beauty.  Dances in form-fitting tights, swaying and twisting, making every curve and muscle visible.

No other art, not even bodybuilding, displays the male physique so openly and extensively.  You don't just get a glimpse or a hint -- everything is out there, through the entire performance.

No wonder every gay kid in town, even those who were otherwise obsessed with sports, couldn't wait for Christmas.

Ballet dancers have mixed feelings toward The Nutcracker -- it is so darn cliched. "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairies" over and over and over. 

And the costumes are rather uncomfortable. 

More after the break

Daniel DeSanto: The gay kid in the Midnight Society, a Mean Girl, a Sicilian assassin, a short guy with a big ___. Who cares if he's straight?

  

Link to the n*de photos

Submitted for your approval: Nickelodeon's Are You Afraid of the Dark (1992-1996), an anthology of ghost and horror stories told by -- and evaluated by -- a group of teenagers called the Midnight Society.  

It aired at 5:30 pm on weeknights and 9:30 pm on Saturday night, so I didn't watch often, but I recall a few episodes. 

"The Tale of the Water Demon": Tony Sampson steals a gold watch, which draws the wrath of the water demon and threatens his gay-subtext buddy, Charlie Hofheimer

"The Tale of the Zombie Dice":  Jay Baruchel fights a video arcade owner who is shrinking teens and selling them as pets.

"The Tale of the Phantom Cab": While lost in the woods, Jason Tremblay (no relation to Jason Tremblay) stumbles upon a monstrous being who keeps teenagers captive unless they can solve a riddle.

And I recall three of the teen actors who appeared in the frame sections, squabbling, flirting, forming alliances:

Bookish intellectual Gary (Ross Hull, left), the leader.

Frank (Jason Alisharan) the leather-jacket bad boy

Prank-loving, irreverent Tucker (Daniel DeSanto, right), Frank's younger brother, who joins the Midnight Society in Season 3, and stays through the series finale.  He becomes the leader of the Midnight Society in the revival series (1999-2000).

You're probably expecting a profile of Ross Hull, who is gay in real life, and rather built; but Gary turned me off by crushing on Sam (a girl) and eventually dating her.  

Frank competed for Sam's affections, too. 

But Tucker never expressed any heterosexual interest; indeed, he seemed to have a "he's arrogant!" love-hate attraction to Frank. 

He pushes to get his friend Stig (Codie Wilbie) to be admitted to the group in Season 6.  In the revival series, he and his friend Quinn (Kareem Blackwell) found the new Midnight Society together.    

Plus his stories are about friendships that are threatened, or grow stronger, through paranormal peril.  A lot of gay coding for Nickelodeon in the 1990s.

I didn't follow any of Daniel's post-Dark works. Somehow I had the impression that he played Elaine's boyfriend Jake on Seinfeld (a recovering alcohol, he goes off the wagon due to Jerry's negligence, and seeks revenge).  But the episode aired in 1991, when Daniel was 11 years old.  Jake was actually played by David Naughton. 

When I was reviewing an episode of 100 Things to Do Before High School for my profile of Max Ehrich, I thought I saw him playing Mr. Roberts, the guidance counselor, but that's Jack De Sena

Our Daniel, a Toronto native, was a busy child and teen actor, specializing in horror for obvious reasons:

Gabe, who visits Egypt with his uncle and uncovers a mummy's curse in two episodes of Goosebumps (1995).

Theo in two episodes of The New Ghostwriter Mysteries (1997): he helps the gang and the ghost foil a corrupt cop, and later, thieves who target seemingly worthless items.

Zeke, a teenage theater employee who helps Taylor Handley foil The Phantom of the Megaplex (2000).  

More after the break

What's Wrong with the Term "Homosexual"? Other Than Being Extremely Offensive and Homophobic?

The English language didn’t have a word for people who are exclusively drawn to one sex or another until 1892, when the English translation of Richard Von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis appeared.  It divided human beings into two populations, the heterosexual and the homosexual, the one normal, natural, benign, the other contingent, abnormal, unnatural, purveyors of evil, victims of an insidious and destructive psychopathology.  Psychiatrists, criminologists, teachers, and journalists continued to talk about the dark, sinister “homosexual” psychopath for the next 70 years.

Meanwhile, in subcultures organized by people with exclusive same-sex desires and behaviors, the common term was “gay,” probably derived from prostitute slang of the 1890s.  We don’t know how early it was used, but at least by 1932, when Noel Coward wrote the song “Mad About the Boy”:  “He has a gay appeal that makes me feel there’s maybe something sad about the boy.”

Certainly by 1938, when, in the movie Bringing Up Baby, Cary Grant must answer the door in a lady’s nightgown, and he tells the startled caller, “I’ve just gone gay all of a sudden.”  The bisexual actor ad-libbed the line as an in-joke for his friends, assuming it would go over the  heads of the audience.

It was deliberately meant as a code term, used only by members of the subculture.  As late as the 1960s, you could say “I’m going to a gay party tonight,” and judge by the reaction of the listener if they got it or not.

Most outsiders preferred not to "name" same-sex desire at all -- it was much too sinister – but if they had no choice, they used the word “homosexual.”  The first gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society, used the word “homosexual,” reasoning that otherwise no one would know what they were talking about.

In 1969, the Gay Liberation Front, and the subsequent Gay Rights Movement, made two significant changes.  First, they believed that they were not psychotic, not abominations, not evil.   They chanted “Gay is just as good as straight."

Second, the word “homosexual” had to go.  It was old-fashioned and bigoted. It referred to a mental disorder.  Besides, it had to do with who you have sex with, and they were about so much more than that.  They were about living and working together, sharing a history and a destiny, being a community.  They were not homosexuals, skulking in the darkness, seeking out anonymous liaisons in t-rooms.  They were gay.

The term “gay” was not without detractors.  Many famous homophiles, such as Gore Vidal, Christopher Isherwood, and Truman Capote, said it was much too frivolous for a bona fide minority group.  Many people said that it was sexist, like using “men” to mean “all people,” ignoring the women.  It also assumed exclusive same-sex desire, behavior, and romance, whereas the community also included bisexual, asexual, and trans people.  Eventually LGBT appeared an alternative, and then "queer."

Regardless, “homosexual” was gone, and would remain out of favor among LGBT people for the next 40 year.  In an Advocate poll in 2000, in answer to the question “What should we be called?”, 95% of respondents said gay or LGBT; 3% homosexual.

There are over 5000 gay or LGBT organizations in the United States, and no homosexual ones.

Barnes & Noble lists 3,389 books with “gay” in their titles and 305 with “homosexual,”  most written to argue that “homosexuals” are bad, evil, and psychotic after all: The Homosexual Neurosis, Hope and Healing for the Homosexual, The Homosexual Agenda.

The Gay Rights Movement had a good precedent for a society-wide name change. In 1965, the Civil Rights Movement objected to the term “Negro,” then used by government agencies, journalists, and on the streets.  Negro was old-fashioned and bigoted.  They chanted “Black is Beautiful!”  They wanted to be called Black.

Mass media changed instantly.  Within 2 years, no one was saying “Negro” except for the incredibly old-fashioned and the bigoted.  In Julia, in 1966, the titular character is on the telephone, and identifies herself as “a Negro.”  The white man she is talking to, not wanting to appear bigoted, pretends that he has no idea what she means, forcing her to use the new term “Black.”

But “homosexual” didn’t change easily. Even though gay people yelled, picketed, conducted sit-ins, and so on, it took until 1985 for the New York Times to agree to substitute gay for homosexual.  In 1976, in the Doonesbury comic strip, Joannie’s law school classmate says “I’m gay,” and she doesn’t understand.

The American Psychiatric Association removed gay people from their list of dangerous psychotics in 1973, but refused to call them “gay” until 1997.  

About 10% of scholarly articles today (none in queer studies)  still have “homosexual” rather than “gay” in their titles.  In newspapers and magazines, “gay” tends to win out in titles, but in the articles “homosexual” sometimes pops in as if it an exact synonym.  

It isn't.  "Homosexual" is the guilt-ridden lurker in the shadows of human society; "gay" is the mayor and his husband.

Need more convincing?

From The Week: "Why the word 'homosexual' is offensive'

From The New York Times: The decline and fall of the h-word.

From Psychology Today: Why is the word homosexual offensive?

From LGBT All:  LGBTQ Terms to Avoid"

From the University of Mississippi: Do's and Don'ts Around Gender and Sexuality 

From the University of Missouri: Allyship 

From the University of Southern Utah: LGBT Vocabulary