The Persistence of the Sad Young Man

To My Colleagues in Queer Cinema and Media:

Among the vital contributions Richard Dyer's work has made to cinema, media, and LGBTQ studies, his attention to stereotypes poses some of the most challenging questions. Dyer's 1992 chapter "Coming Out as Going In: The Image of the Homosexual as a Sad Young Man" offers a deft, intermedial analysis across pulp novels and their cover art, films, publicity photographs, paintings, plays, and songs.¹ He identifies the sad young man as a stereotype of male-male desire circulating in Anglo-American and European sources during the postwar years, a figure "both irremediably sad and overwhelmingly desirable."² Rather than treating this stereotype as a relic of closeted times, Dyer explores what else the sad young man might present to gay male readers and viewers. He argues that the figure shows how "a stereotype can be complex, varied, intense, and contradictory, an image of otherness in which it is still possible to find oneself."³ The persistence of the sad young man demonstrates the continuing value of Dyer's work for thinking through the relationships among image, affect, and nonnormative desire.

Condensing beauty, sadness, and longing into a single image, the most salient characteristic of the sad young man was his ability to invoke both desire and identification. As Dyer puts it, historically, this figure embodied a sadness that had "many dimensions––among others, the 'inevitable' short-lived nature of gay relationships, the lack of children, social opprobrium."⁴ In films such as Tea and Sympathy (Vincente Minnelli, 1956) and Pink Narcissus (James Bidgood, 1971), pulp novels such as Joe Leon Houston's Desire in the Shadows (1966), and promotional pinup images of Hollywood stars, Dyer examines how a wide constellation of texts might speak to an audience of male-desiring men who, even if they experienced this imagery in isolation, may have come to see themselves as generators of gay sociosexual life.⁵

The affective richness of this figure comes from how it mobilizes a personal and social confrontation with one's nonnormative desires, an effect that resonates beyond the period Dyer studies. More work could certainly be done on trans iterations of this figure in recent film and television (Buck Vu in The OA [Netflix, 2016–] comes to mind). Scholars such as Roy Grundmann and Chris Berry have brought Dyer's work to bear on other queer male contexts. Grundmann has explored how the stereotype underpinned much of the style developed by Warhol (particularly in relation to his self-representation).⁶ Berry has illuminated how its deployment as a popular trope in East Asian queer-themed film offers both "a sort of existential anomie for straight people" and "models and images" for queer viewers to "negotiate with and work off."⁷ Building on Berry's observations, we might note, in the crossover address of Happy Together (Wong Kar-wai, 1997) audiences are shown, through this figure, how internalized homophobia can come to shape queer experiences of intersubjectivity. Sad-youngman films like these show that we don't stop living inside the social conditions of heteronormativity the moment we come out, nor do the conditions of straightness cease to live in us—an uncomfortable persistence that affirmation-driven LGBTQ cinema has struggled to attend to.

A whole new cycle of texts positions the stereotype as a nexus for violence. While the earlier texts tended to sustain an affective quality Dyer calls "delicious melancholia," recent examples are marked by the interruption and recalibration of this register by violence.⁸ It comes rushing in at the most vital moments of sociosexual possibility, rendering the sad young man's pathos in terms of a victimization that far exceeds the more vaguely figured conditions of oppression in the earlier cycle.

For example, the 2016 season of the ABC show American Crime (2015–2017) focuses on two closeted teenage boys whose turbulent confrontations with male-male desire repeatedly play out through physical, often sexual, assault (ushered in via rough sex and the apparent dangers of Grindr). Canadian independent films Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme; Xavier Dolan, 2013) and Sleeping Giant...