“One Never Knows When a Homosexual is About.” The voice-over is extreme and distinctly 60s in tenor. The scenario could be an outtake from The Donna Reed Show. The narrator continues: “He may appear normal and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill.”
My dilemma, at age 14 when I first saw the instructional film Boys Beware — during a special boys-only junior high assembly — was that it wasn’t too late … and I did already know: I was a homosexual. And I wanted some of that man-on-man stuff. But please mister, let me live after you’ve blown me!
Ah, yes, my 1970s school days: Lunch money, my collection of Diana Ross records and stewing in the cautionary wisdom offered up by 60s kid-films director Sid Davis.
Today we laugh at the vintage kitsch of his craft, but the long-reaching effect of Boys Beware — the most deranged of Davis’ “guidance” films — is underestimated. Many bigoted souls, especially the Christified amongst us, still harbor the kind of delusions broadcast from Sid’s homo-haunted danger zone. Watching Boys Beware today confirms how Sid Davis’ vision helped forge the religious right’s notion of The Gay Agenda with its nutso credo of “Get ‘em and recruit ‘em while they’re young.”
Sid Davis came to California from Chicago shortly after World War II and found work as a Hollywood extra. He was popular, busy and eventually appeared on screen as a stand-in for John Wayne. The Hollywood star also lent Davis seed money to start his own production company. Davis created his first “educational movie” as a way to teach his young daughter about the dangers of accepting rides from strangers. That film led the way to over 180 cautionary “kid-films” — ten-minute shorts that depicted the horrors of marijuana, heavy petting, speed racing, shoplifting and pedophile-crazed homos.
Sid died late last year in Palm Desert California. He was 90. As the New York Times noted in their obit: “Mr. Davis sought to terrify an entire generation of young people into straitlaced middle-class obedience. Every transgression — a swig from a bottle, a drag on a cigarette — led to swift and certain doom, usually in under a half-hour.”
Amazingly, throughout the 60s and into the early 70s Davis’ films were required viewing in schools across the nation. Junior high boys, roiling in the juices of puberty, were corralled together in gymnasiums far and wide to experience Boys Beware’s preachy, homophobic message.
Sid hit his stride in the late 50s when queerness was still considered a mental disorder by the American Psychological Association. Americans still harbored flimsy, unchallenged hallucinations about homosexuals. And Uncle Sid was there to not only clarify their confusion but stoke the fires of paranoia. Finally the “truth” could be shown, the mystery understood: What were homos really about? Sexing up and occasionally murdering young boys.
More importantly Sid showed America (and its youth) what homosexuals actually looked like. And what a surprise. Several of the men in Boys Beware call to mind Lurch, the moaning, put-upon butler from The Addams Family. Shadowy, skulking and always stalking — Sid’s pervatrons embodied a predatory gait capitalized by director George Romero in his 1968 masterpiece Night Of The Living Dead.
Sid’s late 50s productions are tinged with an uncanny prescience. As sexual mores thawed, up popped the sprouts of the late-60s counter-culture and queerdom’s Stonewall Riots. Yes, Mr. Davis could sense that something wicked his way was a comin’. Namely, a feral social climate that might mutate uncontrollably — freeing hippies, feminists and homosexuals (feasting on the young) to run wild in the streets of America.
But like any dark fairy tale there’s a magical illuminated side to Boys Beware. The film’s depictions of easy-going young boys conversing, playing games, sharing meals and enjoying the company of older men are beguiling. At least that’s how the lead-ins appeared to me as a young junior high student with a not-so-good relationship with his father.
Occasionally there is touching depicted in the film — a consoling arm around a shoulder or a gentle brush of a hand against another hand. Put those innocent-appearing strokes alongside the film’s toxic message and the juxtapostion is heartbreaking. This occurred to me while writing this essay and the film played on my monitor — without any volume. Without the freakishly cheery musical score — and the doltish, droning voice-over — Boys Beware leaves us with scenarios that appear to be teens and their fathers sharing quality time with one another.
Certainly I didn’t want to end up like Ralph, the film’s basketball-loving boy who — riding alongside his new homo admirer — “didn’t realize until it was too late that he was riding in the shadow of death.” Still, I longed for the kind of warmth and closeness demonstrated in Boys Beware. I’ve often wondered how the film might have backfired and nudged guys like me — sensing the stirring of their post-pubescent Inner Queer — onto the path of The Great American Cock Hunt.
So thank you again Sid Davis for giving me a glimpse of what I might discover as a budding homosexual. And what I might escape.
Surviving Sid Davis is his daughter Jill, who as a child cutting out paper dolls was shown being impaled by an errant pair of scissors in the Davis classic Live and Learn.
And so we did.
This tribute has given me a case of the creeps. I mean, yeah, okay, so you got something out of those propaganda films but really, to thank the oppressor? I find that abhorant.
Sure, Boys Beware is full of camp quality humor but I do find it, by itself, to be horrifying. Imagine Jews watching similar films from Germany in 1939, laughing at the stupidity of the makers behind “The Jews are Satan” and then thanking the makers of the film for lessons they learned as they march off to the camps. What sort of shit is that?
I kept expecting some sort of revelation about Sid Davis but none came. Instead I read a coward’s acquiescence to “power”, albeit the stuff of propaganda. I can forgive an adolescent’s confusion and intimate desires, but for a grown man to blog this shit without irony is sick and more than pathetic.
I dunno domo. I think the scare films of Sid Davis speak for themselves and need no further lampooning. Just to describe them is to condemn them.
I enjoyed the writer’s take. He superimposed his strong will and desires over the nonsense he was seeing and made personal and positive sense out of it. I think he’s an example of the way gay kids learn to think for themselves early in life — because they have to. I found his memories touching and entirely confirming of his gay identity. I’m glad he didn’t opt for the easy poses of political correctness but gave us something more awkward and true.
Just be thankful you boys didn’t have to watch any of those onset-of-menstruation films. Now those were truly traumatizing.
Eew.
People had to actually watch this stuff? In school? How awkward was that?
I feel sorry for all those naive kids who had to ingest this propaganda at a tender and vulnerable age, confusing them even further to the point of self loathing. No wonder so many men of a certain age came out much much later!
The irony of such films is it’s not the “ho-mo-sex-u-wul” who was sick in the head, but the maker.
Jeeze, sounds like somebody missed the author’s point. Subtlety, in both creating and interpreting is a fading art form. Thanks, David, for that insightful article.
Seems like Jimmy’s folks could give a rat’s ass about what their kid was doing (or even bothered to take him fishing occasionally or out for a round of putt-putt golf) until it was time to take him home from the police station…feh.
Hey! I’ve already warned you guys up once:
‘Your Diane Arbus Moment: Meet The Munsters’.(link)
Now you start on The Addams Family?!!!
“Several of the men in Boys Beware call to mind Lurch, the moaning, put-upon butler from The Addams Family….”
Lurch, like his employers, was ‘OUT’ as a Monster -and had no qualms flying his Freak Flag. Just like Herman and Lily. Please direct me to the episode that indicates predatory sexual propensities……maybe I missed somthing? It must have been hard enough living in Normaltown in the 50s without having to now suffer your retrospective hate crime!
More apologies! More flowers/fruit baskets! Whatever! Just shut tha f*&k up about dissing renegage 50s Americana.
“A satirical inversion of the ideal American nuclear family, they are an eccentric wealthy family who delight in everything grotesque and macabre, and are never really aware that people find them bizarre or frightening”
(link)
David k, that was an amazing piece…you’re a great writer.
I wonder if the message to us homosexuals is that after sex, killing the bed partner is natural, or expected. Do you suppose guys like Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy and Randy Kraft saw this film and took it to heart…only they are the “Sid” character?
I was shown this film in a high school “Health” class in the early 70s in the Midwest. While most films in (sex segregated) Health class were an opportunity to cut up and make jokes because the teacher would step out to smoke a cigarette, he stayed in the room for this one and I remember the awkward silence as we all watched. I remember my reaction…I froze every muscle, and carefully arranged my face so as not to show what any of the myriad emotions I was feeling…fascination, joy, relief, attentiveness. Finally I knew that I really wasn’t the only one. I’d heard about queers…but now for the first time I was seeing them. And I didn’t buy for even one micro second that those boys were victims…I knew they wanted it as badly as I did. Seeing this film made me more determined than ever to find queers in real life. Which I did a couple of years later, in great abundance. I fully “came out” at age 20 and never looked back.