December 4, 2025: Urban Legends: Those Damn Clowns

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two ways to AmericanStudy the bizarre spate of clown sightings in 2016.

First things first: I have to share my two favorite sentences from the Wikipedia page “2016 clown sightings.” For sheer silliness, you can’t beat “In October 2016, McDonald’s decided that Ronald McDonald would keep a lower profile as a result of the incidents.” But for far more significant effects of such a craze, there’s “nine people in Alabama [were] arrested on suspicion of ‘clown-related activity.’” That’s really the duality of most urban legends, I’d say—they tend to be quite silly in both origin and collective conversation; but they can have very real and all-too-often destructive effects on their societies. If you don’t believe me, here’s a bonus third sentence from Wikipedia: “Students at Pennsylvania State University and Michigan State University were involved in mobs that searched for clowns on campus after reported sightings.” I submit that any widespread phenomenon which leads to “mobs” can never be dismissed as simply silly.

So the 2016 clown craze was both silly and serious—but what can we make of it? One definite, and very 21^st century, layer was the possibility—and at times the unquestionable reality—of the sightings being part of marketing campaigns. That turned out to be definitively the case for one of the most famous sightings, a series of viral pictures of a clown wandering an abandoned parking lot in Green Bay in August 2016. A Facebook page soon followed, claiming that the clown was named Gags; and then, lo and behold, indie filmmaker Adam Krause revealed that it was all marketing for his short film Gags the Clown, which was expanded into a feature horror film in 2018. Thanks to such stories, as well as to the era’s general and increasing difficulty of distinguishing reality from reality TV (to coin a phrase), just a month later New Line Cinema, distributor of the in-production film adaptation of Stephen King’s It (which would be released the following year), had to release a statement that “New Line is absolutely not involved in the rash of clown sightings.”

Neither was Donald Trump, at least as far as I can prove. But it’s nonetheless impossible to miss the coincidental timing of this spate of sightings in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election (and yes, the clown sightings were a global phenomenon, but that doesn’t mean the American ones didn’t have specific resonances here). Speaking for myself, but also for many other AmericanStudiers with whom I’ve spoken about the moment, when Trump first descended that golden escalator in June 2015, the campaign he launched looked and sounded and felt like a clown show. And even though by the summer of 2016 it was beyond clear that things were far more serious than that, they were also still, y’know, a clown show. Indeed, I’ll go a step further: the most dominant political and social force over the decade since can be summed up as—perhaps can’t be summed up any better than—a killer clown. Ha, ha, fucking ha.

Last urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 3, 2025: Urban Legends: Sewer Gators

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On two figures who together helped spread an urban legend, and one broader way to AmericanStudy it.

From what I can tell, it has for some bizarre reason occasionally been the case that New Yorkers have bought baby alligators as pets, decided that they don’t want to keep them, and flush them down the toilet, leading to the genuine (if usually tragically brief, as they can’t really survive down there) presence of these tiny gators in the city’s sewers. But the urban legend that there are full-grown alligators living in New York’s sewer system is largely due to one unique individual, the public worker Teddy May. I can’t sum up May any better than do the three extended passages featured at that hyperlinked sewergator.com page, but I will highlight this quote from Sewer Division Chief John T. Flaherty, featured in the 1999 book Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends: “Yes, Professor, there really was a Teddy May…almost as much of a legend as the New York City Alligator [Alligator cloaca novum Eboracum] itself.”

If May was apparently notorious among his fellow public workers, and perhaps to a degree in the city’s conversations more broadly (at least during his mid-20^th century life), it took an author and book to extend that legend beyond the Big Apple. That text is NYPD officer turned journalist and acclaimed novelist Robert Daley’s first book, The World Beneath the City (1959), an ostensibly documentary work that leans well into the realms of both folklore and humor, with Teddy May as its primary guide for both. Daley writes, “Sewer inspectors first reported seeing alligators about 1935, Teddy May being Superintendent at the time. Neither May nor anyone else believed them.” But Flaherty notes that “in the fullness of time, [May] rose to become a Foreman or, perhaps, a District Foreman.” So it is apparently Daley whose belief should have been a bit more hard-earned, and May whose stories are likely as mythic as those full-size sewer gators.

But even if the gators aren’t really there, the legend certainly is, and like all such tales has a lot to tell us about its and our worlds. In this case, I’d say this urban legend is particularly illustrative of the ways we think about the first word in that phrase, our urban spaces. For at least the last 150 years, many American narratives have been dedicated to spreading fears about our cities, and more exactly about the unseen dangers that lurk around every corner in these urban landscapes. In B.V. Hubbard’s Socialism, Feminism, and Suffragism, the Terrible Triplets, Connected by the Same Umbilical Cord, and Fed from the Same Nursing Bottle (1915), one of the worst books in American history despite having one of our best titles, he writes that “In large cities people do not know their nearest neighbors, and it is sometimes dangerous, both from the moral and financial point of view, to make indiscriminate acquaintances without some investigation of the proposed acquaintance.” Hubbard is using the idea as an analogy for the dangers of Suffragism, but it also succinctly reflects this fundamental fear of the urban unknown—and what could be more unknown nor more fearsome than the legendary creatures lurking in a city’s sewers?

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 2, 2025: Urban Legends: Cryptids in Culture

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On AmericanStudies takeaways from pop culture works about three legendary creatures.

1)      Harry and the Hendersons (1987): I’m not going to make the case that this E.T.-lite film about a suburban family who accidentally adopt a Bigfoot and have to keep him safe from hunters and scientists is any great shakes. But I do think that the tagline, captured on the original theatrical poster, is really telling: “According to science, Bigfoot doesn’t exist. When you can’t believe your eyes, trust your heart.” There are various reasons why folks have been determined to believe in Bigfoot/Sasquatch for more than a century, and indeed why cryptids of all kinds maintain their hold on our collective imaginations—but I think high on the list is that we want to believe that there are mysteries beyond the reach of science or knowledge. I agree with that perspective, by the way, even if I’m not quite sure that one of those mysteries is Harry the Bigfoot.

2)      “El Mundo Gira” (1997): There’s no shortage of cultural representations of El Chupacabra, the goat-killing cryptid whose story seemingly originated in Puerto Rico but who has also haunted much of the American Southwest, Mexico, and further into Central America for at least half a century. But I think this Season 4 episode of The X-Files is particularly interesting for two reasons: it links the mythic creature to one of the show’s most realistic social commentary plotlines, about Mexican American migrant workers in California; and, as the title (which translates to “The World Turns”) suggests, the entire episode is presented in the style of a telenovela. I’m not sure either of those elements entirely works, but both are a great reminder that urban legends can and must always be contextualized with both real-world issues in their societies and the kinds of cultural forms of storytelling through which all legends are told.

3)      “A Night with the Jersey Devil” (2008): You didn’t think I could resist including a Springsteen song, didya? This single-only, b-side type release isn’t anywhere close to Bruce’s finest work, but it’s got a very unique and interesting sound and vibe, one that nicely complements its gruesome description of the activities of the famous cryptid who supposedly inhabits New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. And most interesting, to me, is Bruce’s choice to make that cryptid the song’s speaker, right from the striking opening lines: “Hear me now!/I was born 13^th child, ‘neath the 13^th moon/Spit out all hungry and born anew.” As this whole blog series will illustrate, plenty of folks believe in urban legends—but it’s one thing to believe in these mysterious and often frightening tales, and another to actually listen to what they might tell us. As Bruce’s song reveals, that’s an even scarier prospect.

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

December 1, 2025: Urban Legends: The Bell Witch

[On December 5^th, 1945, five naval jets disappeared over the Bermuda Triangle, helping establish an urban legend that has endured to this day. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such urban legends, leading up to a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

On three telling stages in the development of a local legend.

1)      Word of mouth: The basic outline of the Bell Witch legend is that between 1817 and 1821, in Robertson County, Tennessee, the family of farmer John Bell Sr. was repeatedly haunted by a female spirit who came to be known as Kate, and who seemed to be particularly obsessed with Bell’s teenage daughter Betsy. Meanwhile, a young military officer named John R. Bell (apparently not related to the farmer, which is cray cray but might also explain why the name “Bell Witch” caught on for this legend) was part of Stephen H. Long’s 1820 expedition to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, and recorded in his detailed journal that during a stop in Robertson County he was told the story of a young woman who was haunted by a ghostly voice. Sometimes that’s all it takes to get an urban legend going, some oral history storytelling and a figure and text that can help pass the word of mouth along.   

2)      Media Investigations: One explorer’s journal wouldn’t likely be enough to perpetuate a legend for generations, though—for that, it takes the kinds of repeated rediscoveries and reports that media outlets can provide. One of the main such outlets for the Bell Witch legend was none other than my public scholarly home The Saturday Evening Post, which supposedly reported on the legend sometime around 1850 (the details are, appropriately, sketchy). Those reports were then picked up later in the 1850s by two New England periodicals, the New England Farmer and Green Mountain Freeman, both of which credited the Post. A few decades later, we see another example of this trend, as a pamphlet associated with the 1880 Nashville Centennial Exposition included a new account of the Bell Witch legend, presumably based on one or more of these earlier versions. The legend continues!

3)      An obsessed author: Those various versions would likely have ensured that the Bell Witch legend didn’t die out completely, but they seem sufficiently isolated in both time and place that they would likely not have been enough to lead to tons of 20^th and early 21^st century pop culture representations. For that, it took what it often takes, an obsessive individual willing to do a very, very deep dive. In this case, that individual was the strikingly named Martin Van Buren Ingram, a Kentucky Civil War veteran turned journalist who became interested in the legend around 1890 and in 1894 published a book with a title I am obligated to repeat in full: An Authenticated History of the Famous Bell Witch. The Wonder of the 19th Century, and Unexplained Phenomenon of the Christian Era. The Mysterious Talking Goblin that Terrorized the West End of Robertson County, Tennessee, Tormenting John Bell to His Death. The Story of Betsy Bell, Her Lover and the Haunting Sphinx. If I told you that its publisher, Clarksville’s W.P. Titus, reported a delay due to the witch herself haunting the premises—well, what’s more urban legend than that?

Next urban legend tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Urban legends you’d highlight for the weekend post?

November 28, 2025: Indigenous Voices: Ned Blackhawk

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

On one crucial way a recent book revises our stories, and one small but beautiful way.

Way back in July 2012, I dedicated an entire weeklong blog series to my wonderfully fortuitous rediscovery (in my late grandfather’s library, a moment that now powerfully echoes my time combing through my late father’s books to decide what I want to keep) of the revisionist historian Francis Jennings. As I wrote in the first post in that series, which I’ll ask you to check out if you would (and ideally the rest of the week’s posts as well, but most definitely that first one), Jennings’s groundbreaking book The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975) had been a game-changer for me back in grad school (both because of its truly revisionist-in-the-best-senses content, but also because it was written by a white man), and I was delighted by the chance to return to and deepen my appreciation for Jennings.

Early in the second chapter of his magisterial, National Book Award-winning The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023), Ned Blackhawk approvingly quotes and expands upon a line from The Invasion of America. Which is very appropriate, because I’d say that’s exactly what Blackhawk’s book does—build on the important work of early revisionist historians like Jennings, but also add so, so much more to the story, to our understanding of our collective histories, than has been the case previously. Partly that’s because there’s so much more that he’s able to research and share than was the case 50 years ago, of course; but mostly it’s because of the breadth and depth of his researches and his storytelling alike. I would similarly link Blackhawk’s book to another about which I’ve written in this space, Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993), but once again Blackhawk is able to go so much further than Takaki could, even in his definition of “America” (which for Blackhawk extends thoughtfully and importantly to all of North America and often well beyond).

That’s the significant revision Blackhawk’s book accomplishes. But it also offers so many smaller but still hugely meaningful reframings of our American stories, and I wanted to share one example here. At the start of that second chapter, Blackhawk quotes an early explorer who described Northeast Native peoples as having the capability (but not the tools) to “erect great buildings” that “may have rivaled the ancients.” Two paragraphs later, he expands that idea into a stunning metaphor I’m going to quote in full to end this series: “In Puritan accounts, this region’s Indigenous history possesses nothing remarkable, certainly nothing comparable to classical Europe. Many histories of the United States have taken this same tack, as the Native Northeast seems to provide a familiar past that is easily understood because of its simplicity. Since Puritan settlement in the 1620s, the superiority of Europeans to this world has been proclaimed, fueling construction of ancient edifices of a different kind. Molded not of the region’s alabaster but from ideas of immutable difference, an ideological mortar undergirds study of the Northeast. It was an idea so pervasive that the insights of the first European to venture ashore, who uttered ‘various cries of wonderment’ at what he encountered, are completely overshadowed.”

November Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 27, 2025: Indigenous Voices: Wamsutta James

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

As I’ve done for most of the posts in this week’s series, I’m going to start by asking you to check out two prior pieces of mine:

This Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on Wamsutta (Frank) James and the 1970 speech in which he proposed a National Day of Mourning.

And this blog post where I expanded on that column to further consider why and how we could pair that Day of Mourning with Thanksgiving.

I said a good bit of what I’d want to say today, on this especially fraught Thanksgiving Day, in that blog post in particular. If we can’t find a way to do those multiple things at once—to remember and mourn while we gather and express gratitude, to truly engage with our worst while we still work for our best, to live with both sadness and joy—I genuinely don’t know if we can endure as a nation, at least not one with any community worth the name. And Wamsutta James felt the same, as we see in the moving close of his speech: “We the Wampanoags will help you celebrate in the concept of a beginning. It was the beginning of a new life for the Pilgrims. Now, 350 years later, it is a beginning of a new determination for the original American: the American Indian.” Bringing past and present together, James reminds us that a National Day of Mourning can still be—indeed, if done right would still be—something celebratory and optimistic. Here on the first Thanksgiving since the loss of my father, I’m as personally as I am professionally grateful for that vision of mourning, of the holiday, and of us all.

Last thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 26, 2025: Indigenous Voices: Sarah Winnemucca

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

As was the case with yesterday’s subject William Apess, Sarah Winnemucca is a figure about whom I’ve had the chance to write a good deal:

As a central part of this We’re History piece on Malheur in Oregon.

As the focus of a chapter in my book Redefining American Identity: From Cabeza de Vaca to Barack Obama (2011).

And numerous times on this blog, including here on how reading her autoethnographic book changes our sense of the West, here as a context for one of my favorite TV characters, and here as part of a post on fraught and crucial questions of “authenticity” and identity.

There’s a lot that I love about Winnemucca’s voice, as captured so powerfully in that aforementioned book, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883). But most of all I love the way she combines self-reflection and humility with pride and confidence, blends her hugely complex individual story with impassioned activism, recognizes the most multilayered realities yet refuses to allow them to stop her work. We can see that with particular clarity in the book’s final final two sentences: “Finding it impossible to do any thing for my people I did not return to Yakima, but after I left Vancouver Barracks I went to my sister in Montana. After my marriage to Mr. Hopkins I visited my people once more at Pyramid Lake Reservation, and they urged me again to come to the East and talk for them, and so I have come.” I’m so grateful that she did!

Next thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 25, 2025: Indigenous Voices: William Apess

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

First, just some of the many pieces I’ve published about Apess:

Countless blog posts, including here on his critical patriotic masterpiece ”Eulogy on King Philip,” here on Apess as an autoethnographic writer, and here on why we should collectively remember him so much more fully.

This for the American Writers Museum blog.

And as part of this Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the Mashpee Revolt.

In the middle of those three hyperlinked blog posts, I dedicated my last paragraph to Apess’s stunning sermon “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833). If I were forced to boil Apess down to one thing all Americans should learn, it would be that text, which is quite possibly the most sarcastic and smart, bracing and beautiful, righteously angry and generously graceful—to put it simply, the most human—work in the American literary canon. I could say more, but instead I’ll ask you to read that hyperlinked version (which seems to be working—the hyperlink in my prior blog post had died, as they so often do) and listen to this unique and vital American voice, for whom I will be forever grateful.  

Next thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 24, 2025: Indigenous Voices: Joseph Lee’s Nothing More of This Land

[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]

On a moving memoir that’s also much more.

I’ve had a lucky lifelong connection to Martha’s Vineyard, thanks to my grandfather Art Railton’s enduring love for the island and the multigenerational family story that he inaugurated there: first as a 1930s teenager working with his fisherman uncle, then as a 1950s husband and father bringing his own young family on vacation, and finally as a 1970s retiree who became the island’s leading historian. The family has finally had to sell my grandparents’ house, but we were determined to keep the Vineyard connection going in some form this year, and were able to do so in late June thanks to my older son running (and running damn well) in the Chappy Point to Point road race. While we were there, we happened into a gift shop near the Aquinnah Cliffs, and there I learned of a wonderful forthcoming (and now published) book written by the shop owners’ son: Joseph Lee’s Nothing More of This Land: Community, Power, and the Search for Indigenous Identity.

Lee’s book is first and foremost a memoir, the story of growing up part of the island’s longstanding, challenged, and still evolving Aquinnah Wampanoag community (along with other layers to Lee’s multiracial heritage, family, and identity that he includes in the book as well). We can see the power of that personal perspective in this early passage: “In tribal summer camp, I learned our versions of first contact between Wampanoags and the English and the First Thanksgiving. These stories, stripped of the usual patriotic flourishes, made me grow to resent the standard narrative of America’s founding. I proudly announced to my first-grade class that I did not want to be friends with any ‘Europeans’ since they were the ones responsible for the killing of my ancestors. But the contrast between my tribal experience and what my history textbooks said confused me.” Lee’s voice is an intimate and vital one that we should all read, this week and all year long.

But like many of the other indigenous-authored memoirs I’ve discussed in this space, including those by the subjects of the next two posts in this week’s series (William Apess and Sarah Winnemucca), Lee’s book would best be characterized as an autoethnography, as interested in communal stories and identities as in personal ones. Not long after that opening anecdote about Lee’s educational experiences in and out of school, he turns his attention to one of his first such autoethnographic topics: the amazing historical document known as Mittark’s Will. As the last will and testament of a 17^th-century Wampanoag leader, this document is certainly part of Lee’s legacy as a 21^st-century descendant. But it also opens up the historical, contemporary, and profoundly significant lenses on land, community, and power that Lee’s title and subtitle suggest, and that he likewise introduces early on: “Over time, I’ve learned that land is not something that is simply lost forever, but something that Indigenous people across the country have been fighting over—losing, regaining, losing again, and rebuilding—for as long as any of us can remember.”

Next thanks tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?

November 22-23, 2025: AmericanStudying Closeted Gay Celebrities

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of them, leading up to this weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

Quick takeaways from five complex lives (in chronological order of their birth years).

1)      Cary Grant (1904-1986): Every one of the entries in this post will have at least some ambiguity, but none more so than the legendary actor who was born Archibald Leish in Bristol, England, but refashioned himself into one of the mid-century’s true icons. Grant lived with a fellow actor, Randolph Scott, for a dozen years, and by all accounts told multiple friends and family members that he was in love with Scott. But he also was married to five different women across his life. Was he bisexual? Were those marriages all beards? Biographers disagree, but one thing seems clear: Grant’s public persona and private life were nearly as distinct as those of the main character in North By Northwest.

2)      Liberace (1919-1987): In the late 1950s, the legendary pianist and showman successfully sued the British newspaper The Daily Mirror for libel after gossip columnist Cassandra (the pen name for William Connor) strongly implied that he was gay. He would similarly sue and settle with the U.S. gossip magazine Confidential over their frequent such allegations, including a July 1957 cover story “Why Liberace’s Theme Song Should Be ‘Mad About the Boy!’” Liberace’s homosexuality is far less ambiguous or disputed than Cary Grant’s, and so the ambiguity here is what we do with such lawsuits—whether we see them for example as expressions of his own tortured inner psyche, or as instead the kinds of media control with which Grant’s agent Henry Willson was so adept.

3)      Montgomery Clift (1920-1966): In this case of this Hollywood screen icon, who passed away tragically young from a heart attack, the ambiguity is interconnected with his most famous professional and personal relationship. Clift and Elizabeth Taylor were very close, starring together in three romantic 1950s films and maintaining a famously tight off-screen friendship (and perhaps more) throughout. So when Taylor said, while being honored at the 2000 GLAAD Media Awards for her LGBTQ+ advocacy, that Clift had been gay, the admission was both surprising and seemingly accurate. Yet the details of his life and relationships seem to suggest at least bisexuality, another reminder of how difficult it is to tell the life story of closeted public figures.

4)      Robert Reed (1932-1992): As part of a 2000 ABC News piece entitled “The Real Mike Brady,” Reed’s Brady Bunch costar and on-screen wife Florence Henderson remarked, “Here he was, the perfect father of this wonderful little family, a perfect husband. Off camera, he was an unhappy person—I think had Bob not been forced to live this double life, I think it would have dissipated a lot of that anger and frustration. I never asked him. I never challenged him. I had a lot of compassion for him because I knew how he was suffering with keeping this secret.” I’ve blogged before about sitcom dads, and it’s particularly interesting to think (as Henderson certainly does in that quote) about the experiences of an actor playing that kind of iconically heteronormative role while living as a closeted gay man.

5)      Freddie Mercury (1946-1991): As compared with earlier icons like Grant and Clift, Freddie Mercury’s bisexuality seems to have become pretty well-established in the years after his tragic death from AIDS. But not if you watch the recent acclaimed film biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), which portrays Mercury as almost entirely gay (with one influential early relationship with a woman). Indeed, the film’s Mercury says to that woman, Mary Austin, that he “might be bisexual,” to which she replies, “Freddie, you’re gay.” Clearly cultural representations of these figures are just as complicated and fraught as were the stories and lives themselves!

Thanksgiving series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

November 21, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): AIDS

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

On one past and one present reason why Hudson’s diagnosis was so fraught, and an inspiring effect of it nonetheless.

In 1955, thirty years before Rock Hudson’s death, the gossip magazine Confidential threatened to expose the then-rising star’s identity as a closeted gay man. Hudson’s lifelong and domineering agent, Henry Willson, quashed the story by disclosing private information about two other clients, Rory Calhoun and Tab Hunter. From what I can tell, that was how it went from then on, as illustrated by Hudson’s subsequent three-year marriage to Willson’s secretary Phyllis Gates (which ended when she filed for divorce in April 1958 on grounds of “mental cruelty,” although it seems she too could be cruel). Bob Hofler’s 2005 biography of Willson is entitled The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson (subtitle: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson), and if we think about that name as representing the fictional identity that Roy Scherer Jr. inhabited for his whole professional career, the phrase makes a lot of sense. All of which meant that when Hudson became so visibly ill in 1984 and the rumors of his diagnosis with AIDS began to spread, the moment’s complexity was significantly deepened by these decades of media misinformation and manipulation.

At the same time, an AIDS diagnosis in 1984 (Hudson was diagnosed on June 5^th) needed no decades-old contexts to be hugely complex and fraught. The first cluster of HIV-infected patients had been identified just three years earlier, the association between HIV and AIDS had only been fully established in 1983, and to say that the moment was ripe with extreme and paranoid rumors and fears would be to understate the case. And if that was true for an entirely private citizen like Ryan White, whose initial diagnosis was also in 1984, then of course it was even more true for a very public figure like Rock Hudson—who had attended a White House state dinner with his longtime friend President Reagan just three weeks before his diagnosis, for example. The fact that Reagan did not publicly address AIDS in any form until September 1985, even though it has since been revealed that he called Hudson in his Paris hospital room in July 1985, illustrates just how much those rumors and fears drove the public conversation about the disease in the era. As does the silly but very real controversy over Hudson’s late-1984 televised kiss with Dynasty co-star Linda Evans about which I wrote in Tuesday’s post.

While Hudson’s diagnosis thus did not change those narratives and fears, it nonetheless significantly and inspiringly affected both conversations around AIDS and support and funding for research into the disease. After Hudson’s death in October 1985, People magazine reported that more than $1.8 million had been raised in private contributions since his July confirmation of the diagnosis (more than double the total for all of 1984); shortly thereafter Congress earmarked nearly $200 million to develop a cure. Joan Rivers noted, “Two years ago, when I hosted a benefit for AIDS, I couldn't get one major star to turn out. Rock's admission is a horrendous way to bring AIDS to the attention of the American public, but by doing so, Rock, in his life, has helped millions in the process. What Rock has done takes true courage.” And Hudson himself agreed, telegramming the September 1985 Commitment to Life AIDS benefit that “I am not happy that I am sick. I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.” It most definitely did, a moving final act in this complex career and life.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 20, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): WWII Service

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

While researching this week’s series, I learned that Rock Hudson—probably still known as Roy Harold Scherer Jr. at that point—served in the U.S. Navy during the last couple years of World War II, spending time in the Philippines as an aircraft mechanic. I wish I had known that when I wrote this Pride Saturday Evening Post Considering History column on the fraught but inspiring history of LGBTQ+ Americans in the armed forces, but I was able to add it as a comment on that post, and wanted to dedicate today’s blog post to sharing that column once more. Check it out if you would, thanks!

Last Rock Hudson post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 19, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): Two TV Roles

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

On how one television role reiterated Hudson’s image, and one could help us revise it.

By the early 1970s, Rock Hudson’s draw as a movie star was seemingly on the wane, with a series of mid- to late-1960s box office disappointments—among them Strange Bedfellows (1965), A Very Special Favor (1965), Ice Station Zebra (1968), and Darling Lili (1970)—a main contributing factor. To be clear, I’m not weighing in on the quality of any or all of those films, especially because the only one of them I’ve seen, Ice Station Zebra, is to my mind a pretty compelling spy thriller, based on a novel by my childhood fav Alistair MacLean; but all of them failed to recoup their budget, and we all know how Hollywood responds to that trend. So, like so many fading movie stars did in the second half of the 20^th century (before the medium of television evolved to its current place, where it’s perceived as at least as high on the pecking order as film, and many of our most prominent actors work in TV first by choice rather than career arc), Hudson took his talents to the small screen of TV.

He did so first with the very popular show highlighted in that last hyperlinked article: McMillan & Wife (1971-1977), a detective show in which Hudson starred as police commissioner Stewart “Mac” McMillan alongside Susan Saint James as his wife Sally with whom he solves crimes. For this AmericanStudier, by far the most meaningful thing about McMillan & Wife was that it was one of three rotating shows in the original version of The NBC Mystery Movie, alongside Dennis Weaver’s fish-out-of-water cop show McCloud and, most importantly to your writer, Peter Falk’s Columbo. (How is that the only time I’ve blogged about Columbo?? I’ll have to rectify that with a weeklong series at some point.) But if we’re thinking about the show in the context of Hudson’s career, I’d say it represented a pretty familiar and thus safe way to build on his film roles for this transition to TV, with its irascible, lovable married couple protagonists for example very similar to the roles played by Hudson and Day in the trio of romantic comedies about which I wrote in yesterday’s post. Nothing wrong with that—every performer has a wheelhouse—but it’s not particularly interesting from a cultural studies standpoint.

Far more distinct and interesting was Hudson’s tragically final television role, a recurring guest starring role as wealthy horse breeder (and Heather Locklear’s Sammy Jo Carrington’s biological Dad!) Daniel Reece in the 1984-85 fifth season of the primetime soap opera Dynasty. Hudson’s deteriorating health due to his long-hidden but eventually publicized diagnosis and struggles with AIDS (about which I’ll write in Friday’s post) led to him being written out of the show abruptly and prematurely, but before he was he shared a (to Hudson) fraught kiss with costar Linda Evans. Knowing all we now know about AIDS, I’m not at all interested in the “controversy” around that kiss, which was of course entirely safe. But I think that Hudson’s overarching connection to Dynasty can help us imagine a different potential career arc, one in which—perhaps throughout his career, but at least in its final stage—his identity as a sexually adventurous gay man was publicly known and he could lean into performances that tapped into his full self. As I wrote in Monday’s post, that doesn’t mean he would have to play only gay characters, just that we could see a Hudson on-screen who was as comfortable as possible in his own skin off it. Tragically, that wasn’t the case with Dynasty, but the seeds are there.

Next Rock Hudson post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 18, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): The Doris Day Films

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

One interesting AmericanStudies layer to each of the three romantic comedies Hudson made with his friend Doris Day.

1)      Pillow Talk (1959): The premise of Hudson and Day’s first film together, which became one of the biggest box office hits of the decade, is itself an interesting window into a fascinating American history: Hudson’s Brad Allen and Day’s Jan Morrow don’t know each other but share a party line, a telephone line shared by multiple customers who have to wait for the line to be free to make calls. But the more enduring AmericanStudies context for Pillow Talk is that its director, Michael Gordon, had spent years on the blacklist due to his membership in the Depression-era Group Theatre, and this was his first Hollywood film after getting the chance to return to the industry (thanks to an invite from influential producer Ross Hunter). Gordon likely sympathized with Hudson’s character’s desire to be someone else, a central facet of the romantic comedy’s hijinks.

2)      Lover Come Back (1961): The success of Pillow Talk almost ensured that there would be a follow-up film, and Hudson and Day (who both served as producers on Lover) made doubly sure of it. Not surprisingly, the plot of Lover Come Back is strikingly similar to that of Pillow Talk, right down to Hudson’s Jerry Webster pretending to be someone else in his initial interactions with Day’s Carol Templeton. But what I do find very interesting is the profession of both those main characters—they are two high-powered advertising executives at a pair of rival Madison Avenue agencies. I’m far from the first commentator to note that Lover is set in the exact historical moment on which Mad Men would focus decades later, making for a compelling comparison between Hudson’s womanizing ad exec and Don Draper and colleagues. Even more intriguing is that in the 1961 film Day’s character could be a high-powered exec, while the same role took Mad Men’s Peggy Olson many seasons to achieve.

3)      Send Me No Flowers (1964): The third Hudson-Day film was also the last, perhaps because it was the least well-received and successful (there was talk of a 1980s sequel to Pillow Talk, but unfortunately it didn’t happen before Hudson’s illness and passing). Based on Norman Basarch and Carroll Moore’s 1960 play of the same name, Send Me No Flowers has a pretty odd premise for a romantic comedy: Hudson’s George Kimball is married to Day’s Judy, is a hypochondriac who wrongly believes he has a terminal illness, and tries to set her up with various other men (with hijinks ensuing, natch). But what’s more interesting to this AmericanStudier is that the film was directed by Norman Jewison, the great social issues filmmaker who just three years later would make the groundbreaking In the Heat of the Night (1967). Directors worked a lot in this era—Jewison made 9 films in the 1960s, for example—so it’s not necessarily surprising that their output would be quite varied. But I do wonder if revisiting Send Me No Flowers with an eye for Jewison’s trademark social commentary might yield something new.

Next Rock Hudson post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 17, 2025: AmericanStudying Rock (Hudson): Come September

[On November 17^th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]

[NOTE. I originally shared this post as part of a September 2015 series on September-tastic cultural works. But I think it sets up this week’s topics well, so I wanted to start with it!]

On how biography adds compelling layers and questions to a forgettable romantic comedy.

I honestly tried to watch the 1961 romantic comedy Come September in preparation for writing this post, but after a certain early point I gave up. Even the Wikipedia summary of the film’s plot, and more exactly of who is wooing or leaving whom at any given moment, is almost impossible to follow; and on watching the opening the film feels more like an advertisement for Italy’s spectacular Ligurian coast than a coherent story. And the part that I did most fully understand, and that explains the film’s title, is more creepy than romantic: September is the month when American businessman Robert (Rock Hudson) annually escapes to his Ligurian villa with his Italian mistress Lisa (Gina Lollobrigida); but this year his visit is moved up to July instead, and when he informs Lisa of the change she cancels her imminent wedding to join Robert per usual. The course of true love and all, but not exactly the sweetest way to meet these two star-crossed lovers.

So not exactly a must-watch classic—but if we delve into the biographies of the film’s stars, it takes on additional and more interesting layers of meaning. For one thing, the film’s two young lovers are played by popular crooner Bobby Darin and up-and-coming ingénue Sandra Dee, and the story of their connection behind the scenes is by far the film’s most romantic: Darin and Dee met for the first time on set, fell in love, and were married that same year. Portrayed in the recent biopic Beyond the Sea (2004), with Kevin Spacey starring as Darin and Kate Bosworth as Dee, the marriage lasted seven tumultuous years and produced their son Dodd Mitchell Darin before the couple divorced in 1967. And no matter what the future held for these two, there’s something fascinating about watching two young performers pretending to fall in love while (we know) they were actually falling in love as well, and the romance between these two popular artists makes for a much more compelling story than anything presented on screen in Come September.

And then there’s Rock Hudson. It would be homophobic, narrow-minded, and just plain dumb for me to suggest that a gay actor couldn’t play a straight character, and of course Hudson’s entire career (much of it as the lead in romantic comedies) would belie that notion. Yet at the same time (and of course I’m far from the first to argue this), there’s something inarguably compelling about the reality that one of the most popular, traditional (that is, starring in the kinds of traditional love stories that were permissible and widespread in the buttoned-up entertainment culture of the 1950s) romantic leads in Hollywood history was throughout his life and career performing that sexuality, acting the part of a heterosexual sex symbol. Sir Ian McKellen argued earlier this year that when he finally came out as a gay man (at the age of 49), it made him a better actor; “my acting was disguise,” he put it, “Now, my acting is about revelation and truth.” Seen through that lens, and given that he never came out publicly during his lifetime (although his 1985 diagnosis with AIDS led to awareness of his sexuality shortly before and then after his death), Hudson’s acting was always a multi-layered, complex facet of his life, and one that lends another compelling layer to a film like Come September.

Next Rock Hudson post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?

November 15-16, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: Three 21C Stories

[For Veterans Day, I’ve AmericanStudied five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to this weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

Three texts and voices that can help us commemorate 21^st century veterans’ communities:

1)      Miyoko Hikiji’s memoir All I Could Be: My Story as a Woman Warrior in Iraq (2013), on which see that hyperlinked post;

2)      Phil Klay’s short story collection Redeployment (2014), on the stunning and heartbreaking title story of which see that article;

3)      and Ross Caputi, Richard Hil, and Donna Mulhearn’s The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History (2019); Ross is an Iraq War veteran as well as one of my favorite former students, and this project embodies veteran critical patriotism amazingly well;

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

November 14, 2025: Veterans’ Stories: The Best Years of Our Lives and WWII

[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21^st century veterans’ stories!]

On the film and performance that capture the spectrum and significance of veterans’ experiences.

There are no shortage of memorable World War II stories in our national narratives—of course there are the overarching narratives like The Greatest Generation and Rosie the Riveter; there are the explicitly and centrally celebratory texts, such as in films like Midway or Saving Private Ryan; the more complex mixtures of celebration and realism, films like From Here to Eternity or Flags of Our Fathers; and the very explicitly critical and satirical accounts, as in the novels Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. One could even argue, with some accuracy, that if there is any single event or era that doesn’t need additional reinforcing in our national consciousness, it is World War II. And similarly, one could argue that if there’s any group of American films that can’t be considered generally under-exposed or –remembered, even if some have waned in popularity or awareness over time, it’d be those that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Well, I guess I like a challenge, because I’m here to argue that a World War II-centered film that in 1947 won not only Best Picture but also Director, Actor, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, Editing, and Music has become a much too forgotten and underappreciated American text. [NOTE: I initially wrote this post more than a decade ago, and I hope and believe that this is no longer as much the case.] That film was The Best Years of Our Lives, William Wyler’s adaptation of MacKinlay Kantor’s 1945 novel Glory for Me about three returning World War II veterans and their experiences attempting to re-adapt to civilian life on the home front. It’s a far from perfect film, and features some schmaltzy sections that, perhaps, feel especially dated at more than sixty years’ remove and have likely contributed to its waning appeal. But it also includes some complex and powerful moments, and a significant number of them can be attributed directly to Wyler’s most famous and important casting choice: his decision to cast former paratrooper Harold Russell, an amateur actor who had lost both of his hands in a training accident, in the role of Homer Parrish, a similarly disabled vet with hooks replacing his hands. Homer’s relationship with the extremely supportive Wilma (played by Cathy O’Donnell) offers its share of the schmaltz, but in other ways his character and performance are much more dark and complicated, affecting the emotions through their realism and sensitivity rather than just overt heartstring-tugging.

That’s especially true of the scene that stood out to me most when I watched the film (as a college student in the late 1990s) and that has stuck with me ever since. Homer, once a star high school quarterback who was used to being watched and admired by younger boys in that earlier role, is attempting to work on a project in his garage but struggling greatly with his prostheses; he knows that a group of neighborhood boys are spying on him in fascination and horror but tries to ignore their presence. He can’t do so, however, and in a burst of anger releases much of what he has been dealing with since his injuries and return, breaking the garage windows with his hooks and daring the kids to fully engage with who and what he has become. The moment, big and emotional as it is, feels as unaffected as it gets, and manages to do what few of those more well-known World War II stories can: celebrating and critiquing in equal measure, recognizing the sacrifice and heroism of a Homer while mourning what war does and takes and destroys. Ultimately the scene, like the film, provides no definite answers, no straightforward adulation of its veterans nor darkly comic takedown of war myths, but instead simply asks us to think about what life (in and out of war) has meant and continues to mean for someone like Harold Russell, and all his veteran peers.

Indeed, Best Years is ultimately about precisely that—the experiences and identities of the soldiers themselves, at their best, at their worst, and everywhere in between. On Veteran’s Day, and on every other day as well, I think it’d be ideal to focus not on wars at all, horrific and cold and impersonal and, yes, hellish as they always are, but on remembering those Americans whose lives were and continue to be so impacted by these experiences—not least, I have to add, because I think we’d be a lot less cavalier about starting wars if we did so. Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?

PPS. For another take on Best Years, make sure to check out my wife Vaughn Joy's excellent Review Roulette newsletter!