We boys together - Teenagers in love before girl-craziness' - Jeffery P. Dennis

But in the thirties, girls were still a threat to the development of the healthy teenage boy, and so he exclusively plays around with men and other boys. In movies from the era, the boys are "constantly hugging, kissing, and crawling into the laps of older men (fathers, surrogate fathers, or total strangers)". [...]

"Teenage hetero-mania is an ideological construct, the hetero dream of a queer-free future revised as a queer-free past, the assertion that whatever might have happened later, in the first garden of pubescence we were all straight. It is the axiom, 'No one here is gay,' distilled, exaggerated, and repeated so often that one wonders what is being silenced." Get to the core of it by reading the book. [...]

We Boys Together is a thriller and a page-turner, for the simple reason that movies, pulps, comic books and yearbooks are keys to understand our time. What we find isn't always pretty, but it is useful, for example when evaluating the strategies of the gay movement. What did we win and what did we lose?

Johnny Sheffield's young, perfect body [who played Boy in the Tarzan series] makes Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller look like "a middle-aged businessman ludicrously enacting a Tarzan fantasy," according to [author] Dennis. Indeed, the young actor's beauty eventually became so intense that he had to retire from the series altogether in order to not totally outshine Tarzan.

source: Article 'The big bluff!' by Karl Andersson; About the book 'We Boys Together - Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness' by Jeffery P. Dennis (Vanderbilt University Press, 2007); Destroyer; February 2009