BOOK REVIEW Queering Teen Culture: All-American Boys and Same-Sex Desire in Film and Television By Jeffrey P. Dennis. New York, Harrington Park Press, 2006, 221 pp., $34.95 (hardcover), $16.95 (paperback) Don Romesburg Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 In this thorough survey of over 200 movies, television shows, and magazines from the late 1940s to the present, Dennis argues that, through teen mass culture emerging in the postwar period, adults began to insist upon heterosexual teenage desire as a universal component of adolescence. Yet, as Dennis’ practice of ‘‘queering teen culture’’reveals, same-sex desire emerged within the very representations seeking to promote its nonexistence. Dennis asserts that the‘‘heterosexual teenager’’developed in mass culture from its progenitors, the‘‘adolescent’’ and‘‘teen- ager.’’The latter, seen in films from the 1920s through the 1940s, enjoyed wisecracking adventures in homosocial gangs. After World War II, Dennis claims that heterosexual desire could no longer be put off until adulthood; the heterosexual teenage boy came to the scene with an already assured awareness of his desire for girls coupled with a muscular masculinity. While Dennis does not mention it, a similar tension between idealized, sexually ‘‘normal’’youth and the realities of queer teenage sexual complex- ities existed in the foundational social science works of modern adolescence from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centu- ries. Experts then grappled with how to contain and expunge same- sex desire in the ‘‘gap’’ that adolescence represented between the supposedly less sexual life period of childhood and the more fixed period of heterosexual adulthood. An insistence about hetero- sexual universality appears to have transmitted into mass youth culture by the middle of the century. Dennis puts this into the context of the growing‘‘hetero-masculine social order,’’defined as much by the flight from anything that might signify a desire for men as by a masculine performance and an avowed sexual pursuit of females. The‘‘universally’’heterosexual male teenager became situated as a future patriarch of the suburban nuclear family in the capitalist, consumerist, and heterosexual vision of postwar Americanism. Dennis argues that boys’‘‘girl-craziness’’on family television shows of the 1950s, such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet , was sometimes viewed as intrinsic, as with Ozzie’s son David or with Wally from Leave It to Beaver. At other times, achievement of heterosexual teenhood was a family affair. Thus, Ozzie and Harriet fretted over the prettier and more soulful son Ricky’s relative disinterest in girls and sports. Chapter Three reveals the darker side of suburbia. Through juvenile delinquent films, such as Rebel without a Cause, Dennis effectively exposes the homo- eroticism rampant among ‘‘bad’’ teen boys in doomed sidekick crushes. Such boys often perished or ‘‘reformed’’ to romantic heteronormativity. From the late 1950s through the early 1960s, through mon- ster movies, beach films, and the rise in teenage male idols, boys were represented as longing for, being with, or resisting the lure of what Dennis calls‘‘the one.’’She was that special girl who, through the magic of heteronormativity, would become a boy’s sole monogamous object of erotic and emotional interest, sup- posedly settling any sexual ambiguity and its related cultural anxieties once and for all. Beach movies raised and resolved the question of why a fun-loving, all-American boy would choose the agony of heterosexual romance over the camaraderie of his surfing pals. Teen idols’ songs went further, portraying a world in which only the one existed. Other boys were completely absent. In real life, boys, even idols, did not always dream of a female one (or just one of any stripe), and girls were hardly the only teenagers swooning over male idols. Dennis’ discussion of the dissonance between popular fixation on‘‘hysterical girl fans’’ and the reality of similarly jubilant boys appearing in photos of audiences for teen idols’ appearances is astute. One wonders how Dennis might have further substantiated boyhood fandom through oral histories or demographic patterns of movie and music consumption. D. Romesburg (&) Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA 94928, USA e-mail: romesbur@sonoma.edu 123 Arch Sex Behav DOI 10.1007/s10508-011-9827-0 Author's personal copy