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Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom: James, Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves
by Michael DeAngelis
Duke University Press
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Poor Mel Gibson. From his earliest films, like Tim, he was considered a hot number. By the time he made Mad Max, he had evolved into a parody of a leather queen hulking about like it was the last few hours of the Folsom Street Fair and he was determined not to go home alone. And yet when he was questioned by a interviewer about what he thought of his gay fans he exploded. "Do I sound like a homosexual? Do I talk like them. Do I move like them?" Apparently it wasn't a rhetorical question.

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No surprise that Gibson, as well as other male film stars, embody various forms of masculinity, and that gay men (being in the business of attracting men) also embody a wide range of masculinities. Indeed, gay culture has always manufactured various ways of "being a man"-- from high-camp queeniness to high-camp butchness: the drag, the clone, the butch number, the sissy, the gym rat are, in many respects, gay inventions. DeAngelis is interested in how these-- and other-- masculine images are both shaped by and help shape gay styles and images. This series of interrelated essays examines in close detail the screen and public personas of James Dean, Mel Gibson, and Keanu Reeves-- all of whom are queer, or certainly have queered, ideas of what it means to be a man.

DeAngeles is perhaps best when looking at the career of James Dean and charting how his emotional openness and vulnerability made him often "look" gay and how that image was used in his films. This is not new territory, but it's still fertile. DeAngeles does a great job explicating how Dean broke from traditional images of maleness-- remember how much he cried in Rebel Without a Cause?-- and how homoerotic that was. Remember how much he and the nearly-too-young Sal Mineo looked at one another during the film? DeAngeles's arguments about Mel Gibson are a little less convincing-- and, of course, Gibson himself is a little less convincing then Dean-- but when he discusses the easy, boy-child-man-guy soft-masculinity of Reeves (as well as Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio), he scores another hit. Perhaps a little on the academic side for some readers-- it is, to be fair, an academic book-- this is still provocative, witty, and, all together, convincing.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com