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Although he died at a heartbreakingly young age and appeared in only a handful of movies, James Dean revolutionized American manhood. As a celebrity and icon, he melded vulnerability with determination, sensitivity with strength, in a way that offered a bracing and—for some—threatening new vision of masculinity. His massive influence and the fascination he has always inspired are inseparable from his identity as a queer man whose complex sexuality shattered the norms of midcentury American society. In the introduction to Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean (Applause, 2024), author Jason Colavito explains the lasting impact of James Dean, his importance today, and the challenges of writing about the secret life of the most famous man in the world.
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INTRODUCTION
On Wednesday, October 10, 1956, the glittering gala premiere of famed director George Stevens’s new epic drama Giant sparkled with the light of dozens of stars. Hollywood had come to New York’s Roxy Theatre, a six-thousand-seat movie palace, the second-largest in the world, to celebrate what promised to be the biggest movie of 1956, both in length—it was three and a half hours long—and in box office. The flashbulbs went off one by one, capturing images of movie royalty, including Giant stars Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and Mercedes McCambridge, as they smiled and waved their way through cheering crowds into the Spanish-style “cathedral of the motion picture” and to their seats rising above the wide, shallow stage, where the theater’s ice-skating dance troupe, the Icy Roxyettes, twirled in perfect synchronization to the sound of the Roxy Theatre Orchestra’s Fall Fantasy musical revue. Police struggled to hold back what a reporter described as the thousand-strong “seething, screaming, seemingly somewhat insane sea of starstruck humanity” who had crowded around rope barricades strung across the corner of West Fiftieth Street and Seventh Avenue to see the arriving celebrities and to cheer for one who wasn’t there. Inside, executives, socialites, and stars filled the seats, at as much as $15 a ticket, the money going to a charity to fight muscular dystrophy. The event, the papers noted that week, was bigger than the World Series, which had ended across town that afternoon with the Yankees beating the Dodgers.
The program for the world premiere of Giant at the Roxy Theatre in New York City listed an ice show and a concert before the screening of the film. Author’s collection.
As more celebrities, like actress Natalie Wood and comedian Henny Youngman entered, a massive phalanx of sixty or more reporters from twenty-seven cities vied to ask questions. Singer and actress Jayne Meadows and actor Chill Wills hosted live television coverage in front of the doors to the theater’s cavernous lobby, fully packed shoulder to shoulder with attendees, and fashion models served as ushers. The movie’s cast stopped one by one to speak with WRCA-FM’s popular hosts Tex McCrary and Jinx Falkenberg, who were recording a special show devoted to Giant to air the next night. Despite the star power on display, Tex and Jinx, as the pair were known, were most interested in an absent actor, his name staring down silently from the movie palace’s massive, illuminated marquee: James Dean. Rumors swirled that the young Giant actor, who had died in a car accident at the age of twenty-four almost exactly a year prior, would soon receive an unprecedented second posthumous Academy Award nomination. Although he had starred in only three films, by most measures he was the most famous man in the world. He had fan clubs from L.A. to Paris to Jakarta. Tex and Jinx wanted to know how each star remembered their fallen colleague. Taylor praised Dean lavishly and told the pair that had he lived, he would have become one of the era’s finest actors. McCambridge spoke of Dean’s kindness to her. Hudson, in gruff dissent, informed the radio hosts that he did not really know Dean, whom he found aloof.
And yet inside the theater and on the street outside, hundreds, even thousands who came out that night did feel as though they knew James Dean, just like millions of his fans across America and around the world. Had they not seen the handsome young man bare his soul on celluloid and felt his pain and known they had glimpsed the real boy behind the flickering image? A thousand of Dean’s biggest fans packed the Roxy’s highest balcony and stomped their feet loudly when his name appeared in the opening credits and shouted uncontrollably when their idol’s face graced the screen for the first time. The special guests and reporters down below heard unearthly wailing from the throng above. Some of them must have looked twice at Larry Chandler, a Los Angeles photoengraver who used his vacation time to come to New York for the premiere. He told a reporter who noticed his unmistakable resemblance to Dean that he was also a huge Dean fan, and like an uncountable number of other fans, he read every scrap of information he could find about Dean. Hundreds of magazine articles obsessively chronicled the dead star’s life for millions of readers, who demanded still more, and now in the bookstores dotted around Manhattan, like the Doubleday Book Shop, where Dean once shopped, and across the country, notices advertised a new biography of the star written by his best friend, on sale in mere weeks. Promotional photos of the book’s black cover showed Dean’s face emerging from a shadow like a ghost.
For the stars looking out from the Roxy’s lobby at the teeming throng, Dean’s phantom must have seemed to be everywhere. His face peered out from magazine covers on every newsstand, from the popular Look magazine to the tawdriest tabloid. Cardboard cutouts of him promoted Giant wherever it played—except the Roxy, where the cardboard idol was removed because it had become covered head to toe in patrons’ lipstick kisses. Gazing at the people gathered to cheer James Dean, it was all too easy to see his face reflected in theirs. Young men and teenage boys combed their hair high to look like his, dressed in blue jeans to look like photos of him, and scowled and slouched and mumbled to imitate his gruff manner. James Dean ranked at the top of national polls of young men’s favorite movie stars. The novelist John Dos Passos looked at the boys and young men dressing like James Dean, with their “resentful hair” and “scorn on the lip,” and called them hypocrites, soft children of privilege pretending to be real men. He named them “sinister adolescents,” but the scorn did nothing to stop boys from clipping Dean’s picture from magazines, studying his three films, and learning from a dead man’s celluloid shadow how to be men.
Even now, generations of men wear Dean’s influence every day—quite literally—in their casual clothes and tussled hair and in the way they talk and walk. So ingrained has his style become that it is simply an American idiom, the language of modern masculinity, almost as invisible as the air. It’s hard to imagine that in the 1950s someone needed to invent it. But still today, seven decades after James Dean, his name continues to stand for a particular type of young manliness. We see it most often in the young men proclaimed to be the “next James Dean” or who named Dean as a role model, men like Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Martin Sheen, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Luke Perry, River Phoenix, Nicolas Cage, Leonardo DiCaprio, Heath Ledger, Austin Butler, Jacob Elordi, and countless more. But his echo can be found everywhere.
There was a tremendous unspoken irony in young men celebrating James Dean as the ideal man. Dean died in the heart of the 1950s, a time when homophobia ran rampant. In Congress, legislators thundered against homosexual “sex perverts” and forced hundreds of gay men from government. President Eisenhower had banned gay people from federal jobs, and employers across the country followed suit. Newspapers and magazines screamed with lurid headlines about the “Homosexual Menace,” warning that “Geniuses Are Potential Queers” and that TV, movies, and universities had become “Home Sweet Homo.” A columnist darkly complained that homosexuals, as gay and bisexual people were then called, had infested American culture: “It is time for the American public to face the facts of homo-sexuality like it has faced the facts of cancer, tuberculosis, epilepsy,” she wrote. Movie stars, Broadway actors, and athletes pretending to be straight were, the columnist declared, the “most dangerous type of male homo-sexual.” These “perverts,” she thundered, “perform on our motion picture screens and stages. They write our books, paint our pictures, sometimes compete in our best athletic events.” They had to be stopped. Such sentiments were far from atypical. Thousands of articles warning against the dangers homosexuals posed to America filled the media. They were so common in the 1950s that no literate American could miss them.
The young men who dressed like James Dean took such warnings to heart, vigorously enforcing unwritten codes of masculinity against any boy who seemed too much of a “sissy,” and across the country, teenage boys had made a game of “fag hunting,” patrolling parks and roadsides by night to lure men with promises of sex in order to rob and beat them. And yet, the man they looked up to and wanted to be was not straight.
And yet inside the theater and on the street outside, hundreds, even thousands who came out that night did feel as though they knew James Dean, just like millions of his fans across America and around the world. Had they not seen the handsome young man bare his soul on celluloid and felt his pain and known they had glimpsed the real boy behind the flickering image? A thousand of Dean’s biggest fans packed the Roxy’s highest balcony and stomped their feet loudly when his name appeared in the opening credits and shouted uncontrollably when their idol’s face graced the screen for the first time. The special guests and reporters down below heard unearthly wailing from the throng above. Some of them must have looked twice at Larry Chandler, a Los Angeles photoengraver who used his vacation time to come to New York for the premiere. He told a reporter who noticed his unmistakable resemblance to Dean that he was also a huge Dean fan, and like an uncountable number of other fans, he read every scrap of information he could find about Dean. Hundreds of magazine articles obsessively chronicled the dead star’s life for millions of readers, who demanded still more, and now in the bookstores dotted around Manhattan, like the Doubleday Book Shop, where Dean once shopped, and across the country, notices advertised a new biography of the star written by his best friend, on sale in mere weeks. Promotional photos of the book’s black cover showed Dean’s face emerging from a shadow like a ghost.
For the stars looking out from the Roxy’s lobby at the teeming throng, Dean’s phantom must have seemed to be everywhere. His face peered out from magazine covers on every newsstand, from the popular Look magazine to the tawdriest tabloid. Cardboard cutouts of him promoted Giant wherever it played—except the Roxy, where the cardboard idol was removed because it had become covered head to toe in patrons’ lipstick kisses. Gazing at the people gathered to cheer James Dean, it was all too easy to see his face reflected in theirs. Young men and teenage boys combed their hair high to look like his, dressed in blue jeans to look like photos of him, and scowled and slouched and mumbled to imitate his gruff manner. James Dean ranked at the top of national polls of young men’s favorite movie stars. The novelist John Dos Passos looked at the boys and young men dressing like James Dean, with their “resentful hair” and “scorn on the lip,” and called them hypocrites, soft children of privilege pretending to be real men. He named them “sinister adolescents,” but the scorn did nothing to stop boys from clipping Dean’s picture from magazines, studying his three films, and learning from a dead man’s celluloid shadow how to be men.
Even now, generations of men wear Dean’s influence every day—quite literally—in their casual clothes and tussled hair and in the way they talk and walk. So ingrained has his style become that it is simply an American idiom, the language of modern masculinity, almost as invisible as the air. It’s hard to imagine that in the 1950s someone needed to invent it. But still today, seven decades after James Dean, his name continues to stand for a particular type of young manliness. We see it most often in the young men proclaimed to be the “next James Dean” or who named Dean as a role model, men like Dennis Hopper, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Martin Sheen, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Luke Perry, River Phoenix, Nicolas Cage, Leonardo DiCaprio, Heath Ledger, Austin Butler, Jacob Elordi, and countless more. But his echo can be found everywhere.
There was a tremendous unspoken irony in young men celebrating James Dean as the ideal man. Dean died in the heart of the 1950s, a time when homophobia ran rampant. In Congress, legislators thundered against homosexual “sex perverts” and forced hundreds of gay men from government. President Eisenhower had banned gay people from federal jobs, and employers across the country followed suit. Newspapers and magazines screamed with lurid headlines about the “Homosexual Menace,” warning that “Geniuses Are Potential Queers” and that TV, movies, and universities had become “Home Sweet Homo.” A columnist darkly complained that homosexuals, as gay and bisexual people were then called, had infested American culture: “It is time for the American public to face the facts of homo-sexuality like it has faced the facts of cancer, tuberculosis, epilepsy,” she wrote. Movie stars, Broadway actors, and athletes pretending to be straight were, the columnist declared, the “most dangerous type of male homo-sexual.” These “perverts,” she thundered, “perform on our motion picture screens and stages. They write our books, paint our pictures, sometimes compete in our best athletic events.” They had to be stopped. Such sentiments were far from atypical. Thousands of articles warning against the dangers homosexuals posed to America filled the media. They were so common in the 1950s that no literate American could miss them.
The young men who dressed like James Dean took such warnings to heart, vigorously enforcing unwritten codes of masculinity against any boy who seemed too much of a “sissy,” and across the country, teenage boys had made a game of “fag hunting,” patrolling parks and roadsides by night to lure men with promises of sex in order to rob and beat them. And yet, the man they looked up to and wanted to be was not straight.
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I became interested in untangling James Dean’s dual legacy, both as exemplar of (straight) manliness and as a queer icon, when I watched his most famous movie, Rebel without a Cause (1955), for the first time during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. For most of my career, I had researched science fiction and horror, genres where aliens and monsters symbolize social forces that we can’t quite express. Therefore, as a gay man attuned to subtext, I immediately saw in Rebel a very clear love story about two boys, only very lightly veiled for 1950s propriety. Rebel without a Cause became, in Dean’s hands, a summation of the new world being born, an encapsulation of the emerging, raw, and more emotional manliness that critics of the time mistook for androgyny, and through his electrifying acting, it also became the screen’s first positive depiction of young queer love and the only one onscreen during the two crucial decades when modern sexual identities formed. In the film, Dean’s teenage character, Jim, forms a deep and intense relationship with Plato, a fellow teenage boy, played by Sal Mineo, one that overshadows Jim’s pairing with Judy, played by Natalie Wood. Dean purposely made the movie into a reflection of his own experiences, directing Mineo to play the role as a lovestruck puppy, which he reciprocated in kind. Mineo recalled that his character was, “in a way, the first gay teenager in films. You watch it now, you know he had the hots for James Dean. You watch it now, and everyone knows about Jimmy, so it’s like he had the hots for Natalie and me. Ergo, I had to be bumped off, out of the way.” The torrent of grief that poured from Dean at Plato’s death became a cathartic explosion.
But straight critics then, as now, just didn’t see it. Variety’s Robert J. Landry thought the movie was really about costar Natalie Wood’s “bosoms, lipstick and sex feelings,” while the Hollywood Reporter’s Jack Moffitt wrote about an ending to the movie that never happened to avoid remembering Dean’s character breaking down in tears to mourn the boy he loved. Although straight critics were blind to it, gay boys then and now recognized, understood, and for a moment saw themselves and their lives raised to dignity and art. In trying to answer the question of why my perception differed so much from that of straight critics, I discovered that everything I saw in the film applied equally and more to its star, James Dean. This resulted in me writing an article for Esquire magazine in 2021 examining Dean’s legacy as queer icon—and correcting a piece Esquire ran attacking Dean in 1956—and this book was born.
But straight critics then, as now, just didn’t see it. Variety’s Robert J. Landry thought the movie was really about costar Natalie Wood’s “bosoms, lipstick and sex feelings,” while the Hollywood Reporter’s Jack Moffitt wrote about an ending to the movie that never happened to avoid remembering Dean’s character breaking down in tears to mourn the boy he loved. Although straight critics were blind to it, gay boys then and now recognized, understood, and for a moment saw themselves and their lives raised to dignity and art. In trying to answer the question of why my perception differed so much from that of straight critics, I discovered that everything I saw in the film applied equally and more to its star, James Dean. This resulted in me writing an article for Esquire magazine in 2021 examining Dean’s legacy as queer icon—and correcting a piece Esquire ran attacking Dean in 1956—and this book was born.
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In death, James Dean had come to embody the reckless, impetuous, red-blooded, heterosexual all-American male, a role ill-suited to his slight, delicate frame; artistic interests; and emerging queer sexuality. It was this tension between the real person and the image he projected that gave him a power that his rivals could not match, a magnetism that fascinated all who saw him. In his life and through his death, he transcended the limits America’s political and cultural leaders placed on sexuality and masculinity and forged a new idea of manhood that forever changed what it means to be a man, and he inaugurated a revolution in America’s attitudes toward masculinity and sexuality that is not yet complete.
This book is not a traditional biography. It does not dwell on elementary school art projects or the financial details of movie contracts. It does not discuss every person Dean ever met nor detail every conversation that he had. Others have done that work. Val Holley explored the minutiae of Dean’s daily life exhaustively in 1995’s James Dean: The Biography. While Holley’s book is somewhat outdated, it is not my intention for this book to simply repeat prior biographies. This book is instead an effort to explore how midcentury society’s conflicts over sexuality and masculinity shaped the life and the cultural impact of the man who came to define both his era and the very image of young American manhood. It tells one story about James Dean’s life, not every story.
In writing about these issues, the problem of history becomes inescapable. This book is told in narrative form, but to tell a story that flows with a sense of immediacy and drama, I made hard choices while faced with decidedly imperfect sources. When writing about queer history, the sources are especially imperfect because so much of that history has been forgotten and the sources, intentionally obscured, fragmentary, or never written due to decades of oppression and suppression. Much has been destroyed. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, surreptitiously collected more than 300,000 pages of material on the sex lives of queer Americans, including many celebrities, in the mid-twentieth century, and in 1973, they destroyed it all. Many of the men whose lives we should know about left little written record of their thoughts and feelings, either because they self-censored or because friends and relatives destroyed what was left behind. Many lives can only be reconstructed from scattered scraps, occasional newspaper stories, and memories recalled long after the fact.
These problems plague any discussion of the life of James Dean. Because Dean died so young, he left behind very little by way of written records and only a handful of interviews, and many of his papers were purposely destroyed after his death. Despite his massive fame, primary sources are surprisingly rare. Every biography of James Dean relies on three original, detailed, and well-researched 1956 accounts of his life: William Bast’s book-length biographical memoir James Dean, Joe Hyams’s Redbook biographical study “James Dean,” and George Scullin’s Look magazine biographical article “James Dean: The Legend and the Facts.” These three life stories established the basic framework of facts guiding all future accounts, and all three contained fabrications and distortions, both intentional and accidental. As writers of their time, they relied heavily on Freudian ideas to assign motivation to Dean, seeking to attribute his behavior to the trauma of losing his mother or the disappointment of an absent father. All three also drew heavily on Warner Bros.’ official studio biography of Dean, produced under the supervision of Walter Ross, their head of publicity, who went on to write a poisonous novel about the “immoral” Dean. Its ultimate source was Dean himself, with studio “improvements.”
Most of the rest of what passes for the story of Dean’s life comes from the recollections of those who knew him, mostly remembered long after the fact and often colored with significant bias and the fuzzy shadow of memory. In attempting to bring Dean back to a semblance of life, I had to select among competing memories to create a coherent narrative from an impossible bundle of contradictions, self-serving narratives, and fabrications. Aside from a few basic names and dates, virtually no fact about James Dean’s life has passed undisputed. It is therefore extremely fortunate that as I prepared this book, a large cache of nearly four hundred of James Dean’s legal, business, and personal documents held by his agent, Jane Deacy, covering the years from 1952 to 1955, were made public for the first time. This unprecedented window into Dean’s life in his own hand and through the eyes of his closest colleagues provided several unexpected revelations and the only independent archival confirmation of many of the claims known otherwise from disputed secondhand stories. The documents included letters written by Dean; letters received by Dean; financial documents; business records; and, most surprisingly, legal documents related to an ex-boyfriend’s previously unknown efforts to sue Dean for the return of money spent supporting him during their relationship.
In telling Dean’s story, I have dispensed with the old, widely repeated, but outdated Freudian framework parroted uncritically since the 1950s. With little direct evidence, past authors have sought to reduce Dean’s life to a wild, failed effort to reunite with his dead mother or reconcile with his absent father. Instead, I began with documented primary sources and the indisputable facts and then selected the most plausible recollections and testimony to layer atop those facts without contradicting the historical record. Significant divergences in sources are discussed in the notes, but this method necessarily involves rejecting claims, rumors, and legends that are chronologically impossible or that gainsay establish facts. The result, I hope, is a coherent and cohesive account of a life too often presented as inexplicable and irrational, revealing a rational but troubled soul beneath the wildly rebellious façade. In 1957, Real, a men’s magazine, labeled James Dean “our weirdest national hero.” The year before, Look magazine, Life’s great rival, called him the “strangest legend since Valentino.” Comparing Dean to other men of similar background and ambition who shared the experience of growing up queer in an intolerant America, James Dean’s “weird” behavior becomes recognizable and familiar, part of a spectrum of responses queer men adopted as armor against a hostile and dangerous world.
Therefore, no account of James Dean’s life can pass without dealing with the question of his sexuality, a subject of rumor and controversy since he was alive. Dean had sexual relationships with both women and men, but his family, friends, and colleagues all came to different conclusions about what, if anything, these relationships meant to him; thus, previous authors who have told his story all depicted him differently, as well. One biographer noted that Dean’s friends and lovers have called him gay, straight, bisexual, and asexual, as have his biographers. Dean himself is no help, once telling the U.S. government that he was a homosexual and the women he dated that he was not. There is no way for us to peer inside a dead man’s heart, and debating whether he would today have labeled himself gay, bisexual, heteroflexible, homoflexible, demisexual, queer, or something else is both irrelevant and ahistorical—a misunderstanding of how men of his time understood sexuality.
In the 1940s and 1950s, a young man who had a sexual interest of any kind in other men, however slight, would have conceived of that attraction in one way, as “homosexual.” Although terms like bisexual were used in academic literature, popular media rarely used them. Most Americans did not believe bisexuality truly existed, no matter what Alfred Kinsey claimed in his famous sexual scale; and in popular understanding, a man who experienced attraction for another man was a homosexual, regardless of whether he also engaged in sexual intimacy with women. Indeed, as Edmund Bergler, a famed psychoanalyst who claimed to “cure” gay people, wrote in 1959, “‘Bisexuality’ counts as homosexuality, popularly as well as scientifically.” Confidential magazine, a popular tabloid read at its height by more than 10 percent of all Americans, went so far as to label bisexuality a myth in 1957. Indeed, many bisexual men were branded “latent homosexuals” under the theory that only social opprobrium prevented a man from abandoning women for the seductive pleasure of sodomy. Thus, in the twentieth century’s middle decades, homosexual did not simply mean gay, as we conceive the term today, but was something closer to the wider range of identities encompassed by the modern use of queer. To that extent, however you choose to interpret James Dean’s words and actions, he was a homosexual by the standards of his day.
And he hated that—because he had been taught to hate himself.
This book is not a traditional biography. It does not dwell on elementary school art projects or the financial details of movie contracts. It does not discuss every person Dean ever met nor detail every conversation that he had. Others have done that work. Val Holley explored the minutiae of Dean’s daily life exhaustively in 1995’s James Dean: The Biography. While Holley’s book is somewhat outdated, it is not my intention for this book to simply repeat prior biographies. This book is instead an effort to explore how midcentury society’s conflicts over sexuality and masculinity shaped the life and the cultural impact of the man who came to define both his era and the very image of young American manhood. It tells one story about James Dean’s life, not every story.
In writing about these issues, the problem of history becomes inescapable. This book is told in narrative form, but to tell a story that flows with a sense of immediacy and drama, I made hard choices while faced with decidedly imperfect sources. When writing about queer history, the sources are especially imperfect because so much of that history has been forgotten and the sources, intentionally obscured, fragmentary, or never written due to decades of oppression and suppression. Much has been destroyed. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, surreptitiously collected more than 300,000 pages of material on the sex lives of queer Americans, including many celebrities, in the mid-twentieth century, and in 1973, they destroyed it all. Many of the men whose lives we should know about left little written record of their thoughts and feelings, either because they self-censored or because friends and relatives destroyed what was left behind. Many lives can only be reconstructed from scattered scraps, occasional newspaper stories, and memories recalled long after the fact.
These problems plague any discussion of the life of James Dean. Because Dean died so young, he left behind very little by way of written records and only a handful of interviews, and many of his papers were purposely destroyed after his death. Despite his massive fame, primary sources are surprisingly rare. Every biography of James Dean relies on three original, detailed, and well-researched 1956 accounts of his life: William Bast’s book-length biographical memoir James Dean, Joe Hyams’s Redbook biographical study “James Dean,” and George Scullin’s Look magazine biographical article “James Dean: The Legend and the Facts.” These three life stories established the basic framework of facts guiding all future accounts, and all three contained fabrications and distortions, both intentional and accidental. As writers of their time, they relied heavily on Freudian ideas to assign motivation to Dean, seeking to attribute his behavior to the trauma of losing his mother or the disappointment of an absent father. All three also drew heavily on Warner Bros.’ official studio biography of Dean, produced under the supervision of Walter Ross, their head of publicity, who went on to write a poisonous novel about the “immoral” Dean. Its ultimate source was Dean himself, with studio “improvements.”
Most of the rest of what passes for the story of Dean’s life comes from the recollections of those who knew him, mostly remembered long after the fact and often colored with significant bias and the fuzzy shadow of memory. In attempting to bring Dean back to a semblance of life, I had to select among competing memories to create a coherent narrative from an impossible bundle of contradictions, self-serving narratives, and fabrications. Aside from a few basic names and dates, virtually no fact about James Dean’s life has passed undisputed. It is therefore extremely fortunate that as I prepared this book, a large cache of nearly four hundred of James Dean’s legal, business, and personal documents held by his agent, Jane Deacy, covering the years from 1952 to 1955, were made public for the first time. This unprecedented window into Dean’s life in his own hand and through the eyes of his closest colleagues provided several unexpected revelations and the only independent archival confirmation of many of the claims known otherwise from disputed secondhand stories. The documents included letters written by Dean; letters received by Dean; financial documents; business records; and, most surprisingly, legal documents related to an ex-boyfriend’s previously unknown efforts to sue Dean for the return of money spent supporting him during their relationship.
In telling Dean’s story, I have dispensed with the old, widely repeated, but outdated Freudian framework parroted uncritically since the 1950s. With little direct evidence, past authors have sought to reduce Dean’s life to a wild, failed effort to reunite with his dead mother or reconcile with his absent father. Instead, I began with documented primary sources and the indisputable facts and then selected the most plausible recollections and testimony to layer atop those facts without contradicting the historical record. Significant divergences in sources are discussed in the notes, but this method necessarily involves rejecting claims, rumors, and legends that are chronologically impossible or that gainsay establish facts. The result, I hope, is a coherent and cohesive account of a life too often presented as inexplicable and irrational, revealing a rational but troubled soul beneath the wildly rebellious façade. In 1957, Real, a men’s magazine, labeled James Dean “our weirdest national hero.” The year before, Look magazine, Life’s great rival, called him the “strangest legend since Valentino.” Comparing Dean to other men of similar background and ambition who shared the experience of growing up queer in an intolerant America, James Dean’s “weird” behavior becomes recognizable and familiar, part of a spectrum of responses queer men adopted as armor against a hostile and dangerous world.
Therefore, no account of James Dean’s life can pass without dealing with the question of his sexuality, a subject of rumor and controversy since he was alive. Dean had sexual relationships with both women and men, but his family, friends, and colleagues all came to different conclusions about what, if anything, these relationships meant to him; thus, previous authors who have told his story all depicted him differently, as well. One biographer noted that Dean’s friends and lovers have called him gay, straight, bisexual, and asexual, as have his biographers. Dean himself is no help, once telling the U.S. government that he was a homosexual and the women he dated that he was not. There is no way for us to peer inside a dead man’s heart, and debating whether he would today have labeled himself gay, bisexual, heteroflexible, homoflexible, demisexual, queer, or something else is both irrelevant and ahistorical—a misunderstanding of how men of his time understood sexuality.
In the 1940s and 1950s, a young man who had a sexual interest of any kind in other men, however slight, would have conceived of that attraction in one way, as “homosexual.” Although terms like bisexual were used in academic literature, popular media rarely used them. Most Americans did not believe bisexuality truly existed, no matter what Alfred Kinsey claimed in his famous sexual scale; and in popular understanding, a man who experienced attraction for another man was a homosexual, regardless of whether he also engaged in sexual intimacy with women. Indeed, as Edmund Bergler, a famed psychoanalyst who claimed to “cure” gay people, wrote in 1959, “‘Bisexuality’ counts as homosexuality, popularly as well as scientifically.” Confidential magazine, a popular tabloid read at its height by more than 10 percent of all Americans, went so far as to label bisexuality a myth in 1957. Indeed, many bisexual men were branded “latent homosexuals” under the theory that only social opprobrium prevented a man from abandoning women for the seductive pleasure of sodomy. Thus, in the twentieth century’s middle decades, homosexual did not simply mean gay, as we conceive the term today, but was something closer to the wider range of identities encompassed by the modern use of queer. To that extent, however you choose to interpret James Dean’s words and actions, he was a homosexual by the standards of his day.
And he hated that—because he had been taught to hate himself.
*
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* *
“The past,” Faulkner once wrote, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” The postwar world echoes our own, and the struggles and pain of those who lived and died in the shadow of imaginary virtue and toxic conformity remind us of the dangers when society seeks to harm its most vulnerable in the name of a vindictive moral purity. The interlocking panic over masculinity and sexuality that centered on teenagers and young adults finds its match in our contemporary struggles with the same issues playing out from statehouses to sitcoms to social media. The story of James Dean is also the story of our times, and there is still much to learn from one who blazed a trail forward, attempting, however imperfectly, to live a twenty-first-century life in the twentieth century’s stifling embrace.
Excerpted from JIMMY: THE SECRET LIFE OF JAMES DEAN (Applause Books, 2024)
© 2024 Jason Colavito. All rights reserved.
© 2024 Jason Colavito. All rights reserved.
