Old 50's Movie

I was over at Salon.com reading yet another debunking of RFK Jr.'s Rolling Stone article--and let's remember, Salon isn't known as a mouthpiece for any Republican administration! In a roundup of other articles on the site I saw the following:

Video Dog A gay scare film that could've come straight from the Bush White House!

Ok, that seemed interesting enough. I had to go check it out. Let's see what the lefties want to pin on the President this time.

I got to the link and saw this above the Quicktime video:

The gay boogeyman's gonna git ya!

It's the 25th anniversary of the first reports of AIDS. What better day to stump for a ban on same-sex marriage!

Hey, don't be sad. This is what politicians do. They suss out our cheapest, most irrational fears and stoke them into barnfires that blot out everything that really matters, from Iraq and Iran to, let's see, government corruption. But all is not lost. We're smarter than that. Our politicians want us dumb and angry, but we grow more tolerant. We go and see "Brokeback Mountain" and cry. Out of the scourge of AIDS we turn gay marriage from "implausible to inevitable." And we turn this fear-mongering 1950s scare short, "Boys Beware," into a camp classic, laughing at the stupidity of it, and grateful that we live in a different world today.

I've never heard of this "campy" film, and I wondered what the lefties could find so interesting about it. So I watched it. I wondered what they meant by "grateful that we live in a different world today."

For the first minute or so, the things I noticed that were different were
a. not wearing seat belts in cars, and
b. kids thinking nothing of thumbing a ride home from playing ball.
It's too bad we don't still live in that world--what could these lefties possibly find wrong with this film?

It's obvious this was a film about what could happen if a bad stranger got ahold of you--apparently, even in the Cleaver's day, that was a concern. But I listened and watched, and then I discovered what the lefties meant. You see, the man who picked up a hitchhiking Jimmy Barnes was "sick...a sickness that was not visible like smallpox, but no less dangerous and contagious, a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual."

Had the film been about pedophiles, that being Ralph's "sickness", there would have been nothing for which we could feel "grateful that we live in a different world today". But the men hitting on the boys in this film were not "pedophiles", they were "homosexuals". Big difference. One need not be a homosexual to be a pedophile. And let's not forget, the APA listed homosexuality as a mental illness back then, and did into the 70's.

Another interesting tidbit from this film: after Jimmy and his parents went to the police station to report Ralph, Ralph got arrested but Jimmy got released on probation. He got probation for being molested! Yes, I'm glad we don't live in that world today.

Oh, did I mention that this movie was made to be shown in California classrooms?

Update: That link might not work now. Try this one. If that doesn't work, try this one.