Reading Histories of Popular Culture for Man ...

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School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Pre-World War II examples of .... Langston [Motion picture]. United Kingdom: British Film Institute.
Journal of LGBT Youth, 7:80–84, 2010 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1936-1653 print / 1936-1661 online DOI: 10.1080/19361650903515240

Reading Histories of Popular Culture for Man-Crushes, Homoromances, and Other Fraternal Orders of Love ERICA R. MEINERS



Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, Illinois, USA

THERESE M. QUINN School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Pre-World War II examples of popular culture reveal surprising tolerance for male homoromance, according to author Jeffery Dennis. His book, We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness, analyzes media representations of boy-crazy boys before girl-craziness, and documents how compulsive heteronormativity was normalized. KEYWORDS Boys, feminisms, media, heteronormativity, popular culture, romance Have you ever thought that the first love for all men (straight, queer, gay, and otherwise) is really only other men? For two same-sex-loving gals, reading a man-love project and writing a review, is potentially tedious work. However, in We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness, author Jeffrey Dennis makes a compelling case for the affection mainstream media demonstrated for male homoromances before World War II, and thus offers interesting windows into thinking about contemporary political and economic rationales for representations of “craziness” between boys and men today. Slyly written with engaging examples from popular culture, Dennis’s book artfully examines the extensive and accepted presence, before World War II, of “homoromances,” “man-crushes,” “man-love,” and life before (and Received 2 July 2008; revised 28 April 2009; accepted 24 May 2009. ∗ This is a co-authored work with equal contributions from each of us and no first author. The order in which we are listed is based on a rotation we use in our collaborations on publications. Address correspondence to Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University, 5500 North St. Louis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60625. E-mail: [email protected] 80

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without) girls and girl-craziness. Illustrating how homoromances are naturalized through popular cultural mediums, including adventure and lostboy novels (e.g., Hardy Boys), TV and film (e.g., Batman & Robin), comic books (e.g., Superman), in We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before GirlCraziness, Dennis documents an era where man-love is normalized. Chapters are focused on very detailed textual analyses of a range of predominantly white, popular-cultural products including Andy Hardy, Tarzan and the Huntress, Buck Rogers and Buddy, Tyler and Spud, and Batman and Robin for example. Through Dennis’s analysis, these winsome duos illustrate just how unmanly girl-craziness was, and just how much in love with themselves men were (and presumably are), based on how much airtime was consumed with these manifestations. As the homosexual and the adolescent were created in the same era, “both conceived of as underdeveloped, atavistic egos that required intervention, diagnosis, and redemption to take their place in the glorious white, male European and heterosexual future” (Dennis, 2007, p. 54), examining representations of the invert and the adolescent of pre-and post-WW II offers compelling and wide-ranging opportunity to engage with the strategies of redemption built into these stories. Absent from the author’s organizing structure, however, is a meaningful incorporation of feminist theory, and the book indicates only a slim engagement with frameworks of race, discourses and theories of white supremacy, and contexts of nationalism. While some of these trajectories are clearly not in the scope of analysis set by Dennis in the Introduction, some exploration within these lines could augment and move the textual examinations into new and important directions. For example, how did post-WW II lesbian cultures and feminist liberation movements reshape male homoromances? One way to squash the rise of sister-love, and the economic and political demands by women that surged directly after WW II because of their shifting war-roles (away from the private sphere of the home, and out to the choices of public life) is to stringently stress the imperative and the normalcy of heterosexuality and marriage, in other words, heteronormativity (D’Emilio 1983). Notably, these goals are intimately linked to citizenship and to the survival of the nation. Naturalizing “girl-craziness” for boys means that normal girls should participate in being boy-crazy, too. In fact, anxieties about out-of-control adolescent girls’ sexualities (among others), after WW II, were a significant national obsession, or as Rubin (1984) identifies, a “moral panic.” With chapters organized around mediums such as novels, TV, and film, Dennis creates archetypes for these homoromances, such as, Lost Boys, Boys Next Door, and Adventure Boys. While the Lost Boys and the Boys Next Door archetypes, “arose in a struggle over white and nonwhite, native born and immigrant” (p. 59) and the Adventure Boys developed “in the struggle between isolation and empire” (p. 59), Dennis offers a relatively slim economic, racial, and political context within which to place this analysis. While

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his focus is primarily on media analysis, and We Boys Together would offer a good methodological model for those engaged in media studies, these popular-cultural representations also forged images of white masculinity that were central to nation-building, and maintaining a system of racial apartheid in the United States. The almost absolute erasure of black boys and black youth from these representations is telling and merits further analysis. A detailed examination of visual culture, through the lens of race, that more explicitly connected historic representations to empire and nativism, could lead us to better understand how mass media is used as a form of ideological trafficking. We suggest starting with the powerful work of Black gay filmmakers Marlon Riggs (1987, Ethnic Notions; and 1989, Tongues Untied) and Isaac Julien (1989, Looking for Langston); these artists explore performances of race, gender, and sexual identity in popular culture, and how these have been used to maintain white supremacy, queer invisibility, and homohatred. As well, closer looks at archival work could help us understand the contemporary manifestations of homoromances apparent, for example, in wildly popular films from the Judd Apatow school: Knocked Up, SuperBad, 40-Year Old Virgin, and I Love You Man. These contemporary films also represent overwhelmingly all-white worlds of man-boys living, if not in explicit man-crush worlds, ones where heterosexuality is exaggerated and central, yet women are seemingly extraneous and the real feelings are between the manboys on screen and those in the movie seats. With huge box office draws from both males and females, these films offer us a moment to think about the importance of the continued erasure of female homoromances from mainstream media representations. In addition, for us, queers whose work addresses the current militarization of public schooling, Dennis’s discussion of how the military motif functions in popular culture–cementing heterosexuality to adulthood for boys while maintaining man-love–is intriguing. As manifestations of heteroand-homo normalcy have historically been linked to national anxieties about empire (Puar, 2007), arguments that Dennis’s book starts to flesh out, the present push to constitute public military schools in cities across the U.S., including Oakland, Chicago, and Atlanta, can be seen as one way to move boys “straight” into hetero-adulthood, as well as into the armed forces. This could solve two social “problems” at once, as enlistment in both the military and heterosexual marriage is declining (Population Reference Bureau, 2006; Williams & Baron, 2007; Wides, 2005). The second to last chapter, Unconditional Surrender, offers a useful discussion about the advent of explicitly hetero-educational films and texts to instruct adolescents, in particular boys, on the “rules of dating.” For example, In Junior Prom (Simmel-Merserve, 1946), Mike meets his date’s parents and tragically forgets his briefing: He tries to shake hands with her mother

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before her father! Everyone rolls their eyes in disgust, the date is ruined. (Dennis, 2007, p. 211)

More excavation is needed here to uncover how this analysis is linked to the other persistent fictions of heteronormativity. For example, Emily Martin (1991) developed a richly humorous exploration of conception “courtship” in “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles.” These texts provide a launching point from which students, teachers, and researchers can ask: What similarly hetcementing stories and “rules” are at work today? While Dennis’s book wittily engages popular culture, and these references make for an appealing and user-friendly read, at least for those who are familiar with the comics, movies, and other cultural productions of earlier generations, his text might be most suited for students in a queer-media or cultural-studies class, who are interested in working through theory and possibly their own analyses of/and experience with contemporary texts, such as the ones produced by traditional man-loving, homo-hating worlds: the military, rap music, and sports industries. Paired with Nancy Lesko’s (2001) Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence, and Young Femininity: Girlhood, Power, and Social Change by Sinika Aapola, Marnina Gonick, and Anita Harris (2005), this book would also be a helpful inclusion for a critical youth-sexualities class or adolescent-development course. In a time when teen homo-interest, in the form of a crush professed at school, triggers lethal retribution, not love, it is urgent that we think deeply about how cultural texts affect the life possibilities of our queer youth. We Boys Together is a useful model and recommended resource.

REFERENCES Aapola, S., Gonick, M., & Harris, A. (2005). Young femininity: Girlhood, power & social change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Apatow, J. (Director, Producer, Writer). (2005). 40-Year old Virgin [Film]. United States: Universal. Apatow, J. (Director, Producer, Writer). (2007). Knocked Up [Film]. United States: Universal. Apatow, J. (Producer). (2007). Superbad [Film]. United States: Columbia. D’Emilio, J. (1983). Capitalism and gay identity. In A. Snitow, C. Stansell, & S. Thompson (Eds.), Powers of desire: The politics of sexuality (pp. 100–113). New York: Monthly Review Press. Dennis, J. (2007). We boys together: Teenagers in love before girl-craziness. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Hamburg, J. (Director/Co-Writer/Producer). (2009). I Love You Man. [Film]. United States: Dreamworks. Julien, I. (Writer/Director) & March-Edwards, N. (Producer). (1989). Looking for Langston [Motion picture]. United Kingdom: British Film Institute.

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Lesko, N. (2001). Act your age! A cultural construction of adolescence. New York & London: RoutledgeFalmer. Martin, E. (1991). The egg and the sperm: How science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles. Signs, 16(3), 485–501. Population Reference Bureau. (2006). What the American community survey tells us about marriage and the family. Retrieved on March 18, 2008 from http://www. prb.org/Articles/2006/WhattheAmericanCommunitySurveyTellsUsAboutMarriage andtheFamily.aspx?p=1 Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press. Riggs, M. (Director/Producer). (1987). Ethnic notions [Motion picture]. United States: California Newsreel. Riggs, M. (Director), & Freeman, B. (Producer). (1989). Tongues untied [Motion picture]. United States: Frameline. Rubin, G. (1984). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In C. Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and danger: Exploring female sexuality (pp. 267–319). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wides, L. (2005). Fewer foreign nationals enlisting in U.S. military services. Retrieved March 17, 2008 from http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/04/17/ fewer foreign nationals enlisting in us military services/ Williams, J., & Baron, K. (October 7, 2007). Military sees big decline in Black enlistees: Iraq war cited in 58% decline since 2000. The Boston Globe. Retrieved March 18, 2008, from http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/ 10/07/military sees big decline in black enlistees/

CONTRIBUTORS Erica R. Meiners, Professor at Northeastern Illinois University, and Therese M. Quinn, Associate Professor of Art Education at the School of the Art Institue of Chicago, are the authors of Flaunt It! Queers Organizing for Public Education and Justice and essays chronicling organizing and justice work published in a range of venues including International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Rethinking Schools, and AREA Chicago. Communicate with them at http://www.neiu.edu/∼ermeiner and http://thereseothereye.blogspot.com/.

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