Boys Beware! (Early '60s anti-queer propaganda.)

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Boys Beware is an enlightening little ten-minute reel hosted at archive.org, which bears taking a little look at.

God knows the current state of affairs is often dispiriting. (I’m thinking specifically about the “Love In Action” thread in the Pit.)

There’s a little cold comfort to be taken in a backward glance – to a time not terribly long ago when the extreme intolerance we associate with those loons in Topeka and their more sinister and lower-profile co-haters spread around the planet was taken for granted.

Maybe one day we can laugh at this film – the way the hysteria of Reefer Madness makes us pee. Not yet, though. Something about the police and the school board working together to put this across is still just a wee bit chilling. Homosexuality – as deadly as smallpox.

How the hell did gay schoolkids deal with this?

How many more generations before varied sexual orientation is accepted as blithely as handedness?

Rambling now. Anyway, I just wanted to share this.

Whaddyall think?

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I think your link is broken.

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Link works for me, although I can’t watch the vid at work. Will watch it at home.

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I’m at work, too - but I think I’ve seen this one before. It struck me as being in the same vein as ‘alien invasion’ movies of the same period…transference of the Cold War athmosphere of threats from ‘outside’. Not to suggest that there wasn’t the all-too-familiar underlying ignorance and prejudice at the same time, but the particular tone of the film seemed to me to show more about the early 1960s than about homophobia.