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played by Robert Sean Leonard, both of whom are dealing with problems of self-worth. Todd is shy and quiet, while Neil is more outgoing (but pressured by his domineering father to follow a strictly laid-out plan for his future adult life). Mr. Keating (Williams) shocks his class when he encourages them to think independently and to follow the proverbial “beat of a different drummer.” He demands that his students

“look at things in a different way” and “consider not just what the author thinks, consider what you think.” Excited by these concepts, Neil soon convinces Todd and his buddies to recreate a secret organization that Keating belonged to when
he
was a student at Welton, the “Dead Poets Society,” committed to “sucking the marrow out of life.”

As this last quote from Thoreau points out, Keating’s choice of texts for teaching his life lessons are filled with implications. The first words he speaks in his first class are “Oh captain, my captain,” penned by homosexual poet Walt Whitman. Keating prefers that the students address him in such a fashion, quotes Whitman often, and a portrait of the poet hangs in the front of the classroom. In one of the key scenes of the film, Keating forces the shy Todd to improvise a poem in front of the class based on this portrait. As the camera circles vertiginously around the pair, Keating actually lays hands on Todd, covering his eyes and, like a preacher, wills the poem about “a sweaty toothed madman” out of the boy. Such a focus on Whitman invites comparisons between the poet’s recurrent motif of “‘frail and endangered male’ adolescents, . . . pale and solitary young men” and this film’s own preoccupations with male youth.53

Certainly, the film’s increasing focus on the downward spiral of Neil’s life parallels Whitman scholar Byrne R. S. Fone’s assertion that “if the death of a beautiful woman was for Poe the most poetic subject, the death of a handsome youth was for Whitman as highly charged.”54 Influenced by Keating, Neil excitedly realizes his calling to be an actor instead of a lawyer, though he knows his father will be dead set against it.

Consequently, when Neil lands the role of Puck in a local production of
A Midsummer’s Night Dream,
he decides to hide it from his father. Eventually, though, the secret comes out, and, supremely displeased at this seeming act of disrespect, his father demands that Neil quit the play.

Neil seeks Mr. Keating out for advice. Teary and shaky, he pleads, “Acting is
everything
to me . . . but, he doesn’t know . . . he’s planning the rest of my life for me and he’s never asked me what I want!” When Keating asks if Neil’s ever told his father what the boy has just said, Neil cries as 162

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he says, “I
can’t
! He’ll tell me acting’s a whim and I should forget it!

He’ll tell me to put it out of my mind for my own good!” Thinking that none of Keating’s advice will work, Neil trembles as he says, “I’m trapped.”

Robert Sean Leonard’s performance of this scene makes the conversation seem to be about much more than just whether Neil is going to be an actor or a lawyer. This premonition becomes stronger after he acts in the play anyway and is dragged out after the performance by his father back to the family home. His father demands an explanation and Neil bursts out, “I’ve got to tell you how I feel!” His father rejoins loudly, “What is it? Is it this ‘acting’? Or something else?”

The silence after this last question is deadening, and Neil eventually collapses into a chair in futile silence. That night, as his parents sleep, Neil disrobes and ritualistically marches down to his father’s den, grabs a revolver out of a desk and kills himself.
Variety
’s review of the film states that “There is no missing the symbolism in the scene where a despondent Neil—naked in his room before an open window on a forbidding, wintry-cold world—dons the crown of brambles from his Shakespeare play.”55 Similarly, Mike Hammond’s analysis of the film points out that “
Dead Poets Society
has as its central concern the rite of passage from boyhood to (heterosexual) manhood. Neil fails to make this transition.”56 Like
Down and Out in Beverly Hills,
the word “homosexual” is never uttered in the film—and yet it is nearly impossible to make sense of Neil’s suicide without thinking of him as gay.57

The success of
Dead Poets Society
was followed by such predominantly male-cast films as
Alive, The Three Musketeers, Newsies, White
Fang, Swing Kids, The Jungle Book, Squanto: A Warrior’s Tale
and
Tom and
Huck.
Ethan Hawke starred in both
Alive
and
White Fang. The Three Musketeers
introduced to a number of audience members the cherubic face of Chris O’Donnell, as a D’Artangan in blonde ringlets (and menaced by a Cardinal Richelieu played by Tim Curry, most famous for his role as the transvestite Dr. Frank N. Furter in
The Rocky Horror Picture Show

[1974]). Brandon Lee spent most of the live-action version of
The Jungle
Book
wearing little but a loincloth.
Newsies
and
Swing Kids
starred Christian Bale, who had first made a splash as a preteen in Steven Spielberg’s
Empire of the Sun.
By 1992, Bale was in his late teens, and this pair of films for Disney contains striking similarities—and not just because both were high-profile box-office failures. Both films fit within the mu-

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sical genre and focus on very emotionally-charged relationships between Bale’s character and another young male.

Variety
’s review of
Newsies
concretely noticed the lack of female participation in the plotline. While acknowledging that a few women
did
appear in the picture, the reviewer went on to state that “Ann-Mar-gret . . . is shoehorned into the film to provide s[ex] a[ppeal] in a male-dominated story. Only other female role of any substance is Ele Keats’

[
sic
] bland tenement girl, who’s around so Bale can . . . have someone to clinch at the end.”58 Keats’ character (Sara) shows up for a brief moment about half an hour into the film and doesn’t return until another hour has gone by. It is only at this second appearance that Bale’s character (Cowboy Jack) seems to be vaguely interested. While Sara
is
the one that Jack clinches at the end of the film, her brother David (played by David Moscow) forms the central relationship with Jack in this “male-dominated story.” Jack and his buddies work as newspaper hawkers in turn-of-the-century New York City. The picture opens as they wake up in a boarding house—many of them parading about in their underwear or in towels. (
Dead Poets Society
contained a similar bathroom scene but without the singing and dancing.) At the newspaper offices, Jack quickly links up with David (David Moscow) and his little brother, who are new at the job. Sparks fly almost immediately. Jack proposes that he, David and the little brother form a partnership, commenting that David will “get the benefit of observing me at no charge.” David quickly rejoins, “If you’re so great, what do you need me for?” The rest of the newsboys exchange “oohs” and “ahhs” at every barb. Even with these taunts, the two stick with each other, and soon David has invited Jack to meet his parents and to move in with them.

The relationship between Jack and David forms the core of the film.

When the newsies go on strike, the two pair up as leaders—Jack as the charismatic speaker and David as “the man behind the man,” who tells him what to say. The major crisis in the film occurs when the evil Pulitzer (Robert Duvall) gets Jack to act as a scab by threatening to set his goons on David and his family. The narrative reaches its emotional peak when Jack has to “break up” with David without explaining that it is for David’s safety. The camera lingers on the betrayal in David’s eyes, as well as the devastation of Jack afterwards. In fact, the film is fascinated with the images of young men.
Newsies
was directed by chore-ographer Kenny Ortega, and all of the dance sequences use young men dancing together. In one number, titled “Seize the Day” (the phrase 164

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used in the ad campaign for
Dead Poets Society
), the chorus boys roll chest to chest against each other and link arms in solidarity. All the male characters are constantly hugging each other or exchanging deep meaningful glances as they shake hands.

Eventually, some goons of Pulitzer’s decide to harass Sara, and David tries to step in. Significantly, Jack doesn’t appear on the scene until the goons have forsaken Sara, now cowering in a corner, and are ganging up on David. Jack comes to the rescue, forsaking his role as a scab. David asks him with a sly smile, “What? You couldn’t stay away?”

Jack answers, “I guess I can’t be something I ain’t.” Guess not. At the conclusion of the film, when the newsies win the strike, David and Jack

“swap spit”—albeit by spitting into their hands and shaking warmly.

Yet, the cross-cutting between the two as they slowly approach each other through the crowd for this final embrace is reminiscent of many classic Hollywood romantic reunions. As the
Variety
review intimates, Sara shows up at the last second for Jack to give her a big public kiss, as the crowd goes wild. But the happy ending happened for all intents and purposes fifteen seconds before when Jack and David resolved their relationship.

Even though
Newsies
failed spectacularly, the following year saw the release of another Christian Bale musical,
Swing Kids.
This time, the film takes place in prewar Nazi Germany, and Bale’s “special” male friend is Robert Sean Leonard, last seen playing the suicidal Neil in
Dead Poets Society.
The historically-based tale, of a group of German teenagers who were devotees of American swing music in defiance of cultural mandates against such “nigger-kike” stuff, focuses specifically on a male-exclusive community. Mainstream media critics did not fail to notice this emphasis on boys. Janet Maslin’s review in the
New York
Times
points out that the film is “cast with personable, good-looking young actors . . . , [playing] handsome friends who find . . . a shared love for Benny Goodman records,” and goes on to note that “‘Swing Kids’

eventually begins to suggest that any gathering of sensitive adolescent characters can begin to feel like ‘Dead Poets Society’ after a while.”59

While there are women present at all the dances the characters attend, the story devotes its time almost exclusively to a group of young men, particularly Thomas (Christian Bale) and Peter (Robert Sean Leonard).

At school, the female students tell each other that the boys’ fondness for American slang is a “secret language” that the girls aren’t privileged to

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know. At the dance that opens the film, Peter and Thomas both dance with women, but, when the song ends, they rush over and hug each other instead of their partners.

Swing culture is described as vaguely underground. Everyone

seems to know it exists, but it can’t be blatant. Much as gay communities during the ’30s and ’40s were able to read signals or use code phrases undetected by straight society, these “swing kids” learn how to weave through the restrictions placed upon them. One “swing kid”

reads the spectacle of a Nazi bicycling by and whistling a bar from “It Ain’t Got a Thing, If It Ain’t Got That Swing” as a message that some Hitler Youth are (for lack of a better term) “passing.” The parallels between German swing culture and pre-Stonewall era gay life are even more explicit in the dance sequences. Held somewhat secretly in ballrooms across the city, the dances are constantly under pressure of being discovered and broken up. In possibly the most entertaining part of the film, Peter and Thomas do away with female partners and jitterbug with each other. In the midst of this, a whistle blows a warning that Nazis are about to raid the ballroom. Reminiscent of the advance warning alarms in urban gay bars prior to Stonewall, the band quickly changes the music to a polka, and Peter and Thomas find female partners.

Again, the key relationship in the film lies between the two young men in the story. When Peter is forced to join the Hitler Youth, Thomas joins as well. As he explains to Peter, “We can’t let them split us apart! Anyway, think about it, it’s the perfect cover!” Yet, just as
Newsies
waves Sara through its narrative to possibly mitigate “reading too much” into things,
Swing Kids
also works to deny the homoerotics of the plot. This time, though, an ubiquitous girlfriend is replaced by the consistent use of the term “pansy” as an epithet.

Thomas consistently accuses the Hitler Youth of being “pansies”—

once right after the raid that breaks up Thomas and Peter’s dance with each other. In contrast, when the young Nazis bash a friend of theirs, one of them comments, “You call
us
pansies—even my girlfriend doesn’t wear her hair that long!” (referring to the “swing kid”

fashion of longer hair for men). These moments spurred Maslin to warn that “Audiences may also be startled by occasional anti-gay epithets in the dialogue.”60 Being the last sentence of her review, this point is emphasized, even though many Hollywood films regularly 166

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spew forth anti-gay rhetoric (as one montage in the film documentary adaption of
The Celluloid Closet
amply shows). Maslin’s perceived need to alert viewers indicates an assumption regarding what type of people might be showing up to see the film.

The intensity of Thomas and Peter’s relationship is highlighted, just as in
Newsies,
when the two “break up.” Thomas becomes “seduced” by Nazi propaganda (the film uses a montage derivative of Leni Reifenstahl’s
Olympia
to communicate the hypnotic homoerotic pull the program has on Thomas), while Peter still resists it. Their friendship is consequently torn asunder. The final sign that Thomas has been won over to the Nazis occurs at a cafe where Peter and Thomas both have female dates, but Thomas cannot stop staring in adoration over his shoulder at the Nazi officers behind them. The end of the film climaxes as the two come to blows during a Nazi raid of a swing dance in which Peter is a dance attendee and Thomas is one of the arresting officers. The film seems to view Peter’s decision to attend the final swing dance of the story as a political statement—one which is underlined first by a sweaty, intense (and almost laughable) dance solo by Peter on the ballroom floor, and then by the defiant (and
definitely
laughable) final cry of Peter’s as he’s carted off by the Nazis: “Swing heil!”