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A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A
Dear Camille,
I am baffled by the sudden emergence and deification of anachronistically beautiful young men in the spotlight of Western pop culture. What is behind the overnight surge in popularity, and ascension to male sex icon status, of such androgynous figures as the Hanson brothers, Leonardo DiCaprio and Britain's Prince William? As a Singaporean (living in the West), I can account for their high currency in the contemporary cultures of industrialized Asian nations. There the heterosexual "pretty boy" is ubiquitous. (cf. Japanese anime.)
Heretofore in the West, beautiful boys had been popular in mainstream gay porn only, where they are known as "twinks." Surfing the Net, I am pleased to see that 60 of the 100 most popular gay porn sites are twink sites. It is always nice to see them featured alongside "hairy bears" and "big daddies." But that brings me to my question -- in a period when male beauty and effeminacy are immediately equated with homosexuality and pederasty (in the West), how have catamites come to dominate the pantheon of HETEROSEXUAL male sex symbols? (Owing to my young age -- I am 20 -- my acquaintance with pop culture has been brief, from the late '80s to the present.) I was convinced that Marky Mark had the market cornered, and would never let go.
Alex Chong
Dear Mr. Chong,
The beautiful boy has fascinated me since I first began to study cultural history, inspired by the art books and museum portfolios that my father brought back from a year at the Sorbonne in Paris when I was a small child. Indeed, the beautiful boy was the first fundamental "sexual persona" that I identified in Western civilization, and hence he became the cornerstone of my doctoral dissertation and later book, "Sexual Personae."
While pretty boys have existed as erotic types in other cultures, including imperial China and Japan, they were essentially catamites, at the sexual service of wealthy, powerful and otherwise heterosexual men. Only in the West has there been such a glorification of the beautiful boy as a pagan spiritual entity, his smooth, androgynous flesh blazing with charismatic light. In "Sexual Personae," I traced the lineage of this figure from Adonis and Attis, son-lover consorts of the Great Goddess of the ancient Mediterranean world, through the muscular, nude kouros or athlete sculptures of Archaic Greek art to Donatello's pederastic bronze "David," Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray and the exquisitely tressed, blond Tadzio in Luchino Visconti's film of Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice."
From the point of view of religious history, the beautiful boy is a transition from goddess-centered earth-cult, where the fertility principle is stressed, to patriarchal sky-cult, where male gods are supreme and where the locus of creativity has been displaced upward from womb and belly to eye and brain. I have found beautiful boys occurring with unusual frequency at high points of civilization, such as classical Athens and Renaissance Florence, where male homosexuality pervaded the artistic and intellectual elite. Such moments seem to have a misogynous undercurrent: Men are bonding and drawing a line against female sexual power, which is enormous and voracious.
The phenomenon you mention in popular culture is certainly not recent in origin. There was a fashion for beautiful men -- really dandified, slightly effete matinee idols -- in the 1920s and '30s, from Rudolph Valentino to Robert Taylor. But before and during World War II, male icons tended to be robustly masculine, as in the cases of Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart. The dignified, high density of personality of the latter two men is completely missing from our popinjay contemporary actors, who have the sexual authority and presence of a cork.
It's in the domestic postwar years, with the rise of middle-class teenagers as a social group with spending power, that the beautiful boy takes off. A prefiguration of this can be seen in the shrieking adulation of the young Frank Sinatra, when most men were away at war. Sinatra's gangly scrawniess brought out the nascent mothering instinct in excitable, sexually maturing girls, who wanted to take him home to pet and fatten up. The brooding Marlon Brando and James Dean were the next beautiful boys in pop: While Brando got corpulent and misanthropic, Dean preserved his beauty, like Adonis, by dying young -- gored not by Adonis' boar but by his own smashed sports car.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, rosy teen idols flourished, from Robert Wagner to Troy Donahue. My parents were none too pleased about the airbrushed, mistily pastel, full-page magazine head shots of Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Bobby Rydell with which I festooned my room at the time. (There was a family conference, and I was allowed to keep them up only after I made a passionate defense drawn from Greco-Roman oratory.) These singers were prettified, sanitized versions of Elvis Presley, whose loverboy good looks were originally accompanied by a raw, rural Deep South sexual danger that got bred out of him by his shrewd manager (Col. Tom Parker) and by his patriotic stint in the no-nonsense U.S. Army.
The girlish-boyish pop type continued in rock with the Rolling Stones' luxuriantly Welsh-haired Brian Jones (another premature death) and Paul McCartney, the most popular by far of the Beatles, who set off wild delirium among teenage girls. It's no coincidence that false rumors swept the world at one point about Paul's death, since sacrificial execution is built into the mythic archetype of the beautiful boy.
Gay men before Stonewall were notorious for frenzied public rituals over divas like Judy Garland or Maria Callas. It's mainly girls, however, who undergo these mass convulsions of hysteria over pretty boys. They are modern Maenads, ready to tear their prey limb from limb, as in Dionysiac orgy (see Euripides' "Bacchae" for the gruesome details). Screaming girls are energized by sexual repression taking nearly sadomasochistic form.
I remember racing around the block with my teenage friends in downtown Syracuse as we tracked down the hapless Jimmie Rodgers (of the hit songs "Honeycomb" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine"), who had just made a personal appearance in a South Salina Street jewelry store. When we got to him, trembling with his stunned handlers in a parking garage, we swirled around him so close that I could smell the aftershave lotion emanating damply from his silky white collar. Sparagmos -- mutilation and dismemberment -- is intrinsic to Dionysian worship.
The beautiful boy is idealized by gay men because he represents physical perfection (what the Greeks called "bloom") as well as independence from the all-consuming mother -- a self-protective psychic isolation expressed by the boy's graceful, maddening elusiveness. He is an eternal snapshot of the male escaped from his parental home but not yet subordinated to the wife who will drain him with righteous demands. As a father, he will be dutiful, but he will not be beautiful -- hence our rubric that the beautiful boy must die.
If the beautiful boy is at a zenith these days among gays, it's because he dramatizes the melancholy transience of a magic moment: His radiance is threatened not just by age but by disease, which stalks the gay world. Additionally, manhood is under so much attack, from economic changes (where's virility in a computerized office?) and from militant feminism, that maturation is difficult or impossible. Without adequate male role models, boys cannot make the rite de passage into adulthood. The beautiful boy is frozen in time.
N E X T_P A G E | Those sexless Hanson boys
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