Although Sal Mineo was later twice nominated for Oscars, his career peaked when he was sixteen, playing Rebel Without a Cause's geeky Plato, a universal touchstone for anyone who's ever harbored a crush on James Dean. As if it wouldn't be exhilarating and nerve-wracking enough in 1955 to be a gay Sicilian sixteen year-old acting opposite the blond, bi twenty-four year-old superstar and Natalie Wood, Mineo was also having an affair with the director, Nicholas Ray, who was forty-four. It was all downhill from there. Mineo was praised for his stage roles and for his work in Exodus and Who Killed Teddy Bear? and he recorded a couple albums with two Top 40 hits, but he had been typecast and his moment had passed. Hollywood's sensitive, gay teen devolved into television's deranged psycho killer on Hawaii Five-O, Columbo, S.W.A.T., Police Story, and Ellery Queen. When he was thirty-seven, walking at night through an alley near his home in West Hollywood, he was stabbed once in a botched mugging, and died. John Lennon offered a cash reward to find his killer. Many people, including Mineo's family, believe the courts convicted the wrong man, who had confessed and recanted, was released in 1990, and was reincarcerated for parole violations. In Thebes' queer lit poll Kevin Killian praised Michael Michaud's new biography [[Kindle]] as one of the year's best.
When it comes to southern California fiction of sex and violence, Brett Easton Ellis is the popular one and Dennis Cooper is the artist. In 1968, when he was fifteen, he read 120 Days of Sodom and wrote his own de Sade-like 1,000 page novel set in high school. Thirty-nine years later, Cooper was award the Prix Sade in France for his tenth novel, The Sluts [no Kindle]. We'll never know how that first fiction compares to his mature work with his signal interest in transgressive behavior and exploited boundaries (alienated youth, predatory gay men, child abuse, sexual torture, eroticized murder, mutilation, satanic sacrifice, snuff porn, and drugs) because he was so afraid his mother would find his manuscript he burned it. His George Miles cycle of novels -- Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period [[Kindle]] -- has been translated into seventeen languages. A child of Pasadena, Cooper has lived in New York, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, and Paris. Whether or not you follow his fiction into its darker explorations, his blog is essential daily reading [NSFW]. Cooper is always writing, and when he's not, he's publishing important young newcomers through his own imprint at Akashic, Little House on the Bowery. Prominent among these is Derek McCormack's breakout Tod Browning fantasia, The Show That Smells. Next month comes Lonely Christopher's story collection, The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse.
For me to remember Sal Mino so fondly he must have been in a number of significant movies, in addition to Rebel, during the 50s. Of course with just one screen in town that ran the same movie for a week, we watched whatever came significant or not.
Posted by: D | January 11, 2011 at 08:56 AM