Love Laughs at Andy Hardy: The Rise of the Male Heterosexual Teenager

US cinematic representations of young heterosexual males from the 1940s & 1950s are examined to ascertain whether characters who were delineated as girl-crazy challenged conventional American notions of masculinity. Although interwar Hollywood tacitly accepted male & female homosexuality, it is contended that government pressures against same-sex relationships & psychologists' concerns about male adolescents' perversion contributed to the rejection of transgressive sexualities & to the emergence of the girl-crazy, all-American young male in popular cinema. Scrutiny of movies involving the fictional characters Henry Aldrich & Andy Hardy & actor Jackie Moran revealed that relationships within older male characters were apparently important to adolescent masculinity & that girl-craziness essentially feminized these characters or delineated them as transgressing conventional gender identities; moreover, it is noted that these teenage male characters generally failed to exhibit heterosexual desire. Nevertheless, it is stressed that post-war girl-crazy male adolescent characters were generally not emasculated & that their introduction to the adult world typically involved the adoption of heteronormative masculinity. 38 References. J. W. Parker