Boys Beware

I generally find anti-gay bigotry disturbing, but sometimes it’s also kind of amusing. I know that’s wrong — that gay people face real threats of discrimination and violence — but some anti-gay nonsense just makes me want to point and yell, “I didn’t know they still made people like you!”

Which brings me to Rick Perry’s culture-war campaign ad:

Aside from the fact that he’s a bit mixed up about school prayer, this is just plain embarassing. It’s like that older relative who keeps calling black people “colored” because he doesn’t realize times have changed. I immediately flashed back to an infamous Sid Davis classroom film called Boys Beware about the dangers of homosexuality. The whole thing is about 10 minutes long, but here’s a taste:

At its most basic, Boys Beware is vile crap that conflates homosexuality with predatory pedophilia. Yet it’s so disconnected from our current day and age that I can’t really get angry about it. I mean, it features a homosexual man who prowls the streets trying to seduce young boys by — I’m not making this up — taking them fishing at the duck pond. I guess there weren’t a lot of gay dance clubs.

(Boys Beware‘s odd style is pretty typical of Sid Davis’s social guidance films: The subject is alarming, but it’s shot with what Ken Smith in Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970 described as “a trancelike style, stripped of anything even remotely approaching drama or human emotion.” You never even hear the actors speaking; the narrator just describes what they’re saying. I suspect’s that’s because Davis couldn’t afford synchronized sound.)

And how can you not love the line “You never know when the homosexual is about”? If I were gay, I’d wear that on a T-shirt.

I don’t really have a point here, except that to me, Perry’s anti-gay attitude seems like something from another era. I hope it seems that way to most other people too.