Rough Transcript

Season 2: Episode 1

Bandstand and the Closet

Hosts: Gillian Frank & Lauren Gutterman

Guests and Additional Audio: Arlene Sullivan, Matt Delmont, Marc Stein, Ray Smith, Dick Clark, Pat Boone, Frank Brancaccio, Boys Beware Narrator, General Electric TV Salesman, Preacher, American Bandstand Host

Arlene Sullivan: My name is Arlene Sullivan, I danced on American Bandstand from 1956 to the beginning of 1960. I had a partner, Kenny Rossi, and we were a couple on the show. One day, Dick Clark started to talk to me and all the sudden I became one of the most popular kids on the show. When I got there, I was there maybe a month or two, and I went up to this one regular and I said, “I really like Billy.” And she turned around to me and she said, “He doesn’t like girls.” And I said, “What!?” I never met a homosexual, I never even knew anything about it. But, I said, “What do you mean?”, [she said] “Well he’s a homosexual and he doesn’t like girls, he likes boys.” And I said… I wasn’t shocked, because inside of me I knew, there was something inside of me that was different from everybody else too. I wasn’t uncomfortable when she told me and then I find out that a lot of the boys are gay and also, some of the girls are gay. And then I really got fascinated, and it wasn’t until I went to the show that I realized that I also are one of them. And we became a family.

Lauren Gutterman: That was Arlene Sullivan. In the 1950s, Arlene became famous for dancing on the television show American Bandstand. She received hundreds of fan letters each week and she became the object of a number of schoolboy and schoolgirl crushes.

In 2016, nearly sixty years after she first danced on the show, Arlene Sullivan and her friend and fellow Bandstand dancer, Ray Smith published a book called Bandstand Diaries. The book includes glossy pictures, short essays, and biographies of the dancers with updates about their lives. Bandstand Diaries looks and feels like a high school yearbook.

But casually inserted into these essays and biographies are simple and unashamed disclosures that Arlene Sullivan, Ray Smith and a number of other regular Bandstand dancers are gay. What’s more, during their years on the show, these gay and lesbian Bandstand dancers quietly formed a queer community. Their coming out, six decades after they first danced on American Bandstand, made waves in the media.

Gillian Frank: The fact that Arlene Sullivan and Ray Smith’s coming out matters at all today is a testament to just how important American Bandstand was and continues to be in US history and culture. American Bandstand reminds us that popular culture is a collective story we tell each other about ourselves. Popular culture shapes what we remember, and what we forget. And American Bandstand has shaped how we understand the 1950s and early 1960s. For many, American Bandstand still evokes nostalgic images of white youth culture and sexually innocent teenage romance: a world made up of malt shops, juke joints, sock hops and drive-in movie theaters.

Matt Delmont: I think what’s at stake in terms of how we remember American Bandstand is because so many people watched at the time, it became kind of a touchstone memory for what that era of youth culture, what that era of music and television looked like.

I’m Matt Delmont, I’m a professor of history at Arizona State University. My work is on African American history. My first book was called The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia. So when you see people making references back to the 1950s, when people want to make a gesture what the archetypal, like a simplified vision of the 1950s was about, they’ll show clips of American Bandstand, right, to communicate that it was a simpler era or whatever they want to try to communicate. I think the fact that we still have those images circulating, helps to limit who we consider to be fully an American teenager or fully a member of that generation. And I think the repercussions are still with us, I think for a whole generation of people American bandstand defined what an American teenager looked like. It meant for a lot of people that black teenagers didn’t count.

Gillian Frank: If we look closer, at how Bandstand was staged, and what was hidden from sight or hiding in plain view, we can see how the show's creators both violently and pleasurably choreographed white heterosexuality at mid-century. At the same time they erased blackness and homosexuality from the official story of youth culture. While white queer youth were closeted on the show, black youth—whatever their sexuality—were excluded completely.

Lauren Gutterman: By listening to the words of Bandstand’s queer dancers, we can see the official white heterosexual script of the 1950s and also into a queerer, blacker hidden transcript that was barely beneath the surface. When Arlene and Ray came out, they reminded us that the 1950s were far queerer than many would imagine. When we place gay and lesbian people at the center of a beloved 1950s television show, we change the official story that we tell about that decade.

Politician today invoke the 1950s when they demand that we return to a moment when America was great. These politicians want to reverse the gains of the black freedom and LGBT movements, they want to make American straight again and white again. American Bandstand reminds us of the cruel stakes of that punishing social order. I'm Lauren Gutterman.

Gillian Frank: And I’m Gillian Frank, welcome to season two of Sexing History.

Gillian Frank: There were good reasons why Arlene Sullivan, Ray Smith and other gay dancers stayed in the closet during their years on American Bandstand. The anti-gay climate of the 1950s made it dangerous for them to publicly acknowledge their sexuality while they performed on television.

The news media, psychiatric journals, and government officials all described lesbians and gay men as criminals, child molesters and even murderers. The 1961 educational film, Boys Beware, represents how American culture viewed homosexuality.

Boys Beware Narrator: One never knows when the homosexual is about. He appear normal and it may be too late when you discover he is mentally ill. The homosexual: a person who demands an intimate relationship with members of their own sex. So keep with your group, and don’t go off alone with strangers unless you have the permission of your parent or teacher.

Marc Stein: I’m Marc Stein, I’m a historian that teaches at San Francisco State University, and my first book focused on gay and lesbian history in Philadelphia from the 1940s to the 1970s and it was called City of Sisterly and Brotherly Love: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia 1945-1972. Being openly gay would have implications for virtually every aspect of one’s life. It would effect one’s employment prospects, one eligibility for military service, one’s inclusion or exclusion from church or synagogue, one’s success in school. And then it also, those who were openly gay or lesbian, or bi, or those who we would say today, trans, there was a real risk of physical violence, of verbal harassment, and, you know, that was ever-present.

Gillian Frank: In Philadelphia where Bandstand was filmed, police were also notoriously hostile towards gay people during the 1940s and 1950s. Here's bandstand dancer Ray Smith:

Ray Smith: In 1954, I went to a dance at PAL, and I remembered my friend Tommy Scott and I, he was one of the best dancers I ever knew in my life, and he taught me a lot about Jitterbugging. We start there, and this was the Police Athletic League, they stopped us so fast. I mean, we were twelve, you know, “No, no, no, no, you can’t do that – cannot dance with another boy.”

Lauren Gutterman: During the 1950s and 1960s, police would survey gay hangouts and take pictures of patrons and their vehicles. Arlene Sullivan also remembers what gay nightlife was like in Philadelphia in the 1950s and 1960s.

Arlene Sullivan: And you know, in those days, when we did go to the clubs in Philadelphia, they were fire traps. When I think about it today, I just can’t believe I went into those places. First of all, they’re all up alleys, they’re all hidden away, and you go up the steps, there weren’t any windows. There was only one door to get in and one door to leave. No fire escapes whatsoever. When I think about it, god forbid, if there was a fire, it would be devastating. But that’s what they had in those days and then the police would raid those clubs and the lights would go on and they would check IDs.

Gillian Frank: Were you ever caught in a raid?

Arlene Sullivan: Yeah! I was a caught, but they would just come in and just harass you, you know, and then leave.

Lauren Gutterman: Here’s Marc Stein:

Marc Stein: Philadelphia police would regularly raid gay bars, clubs and restaurants. In many many cases, those who were caught up in those raids were taken into custody, arrested, held for a few hours or held overnight and then released. And of course, that’s a very problematic form of police harassment. For some, it became more than just a night in jail or a few hours in jail, and for young people that could mean a stint in juvenile detention, it certainly could mean trouble with parents and with families, trouble with school, trouble with employment.

Gillian Frank: Police would enter gay bars and demand that patrons show identification to prove they were of age. Sometimes local newspapers would print the names and addresses, and sometimes the pictures, of anyone who the police arrested.

Philadelphia papers carried stories that described homosexuals as moral menaces and seducers. Some gay men and lesbians internalized these negative stereotypes. Ray Smith remembers that the stigmatization of homosexuality made him feel deeply uneasy about his sexual desires:

Ray Smith: Well, you were like in the loafers, that was one. Or my mom’s, my mom’s favorite word was “fruit”. She once said to me, “My friend Tommy, he got married, he had a child, and then he disappeared.” And I said to my mom, “Whatever happened happened to him?” Cause she knew his mother really well.

“Whatever happened to Tommy?”

“Oh you didn’t hear, he went to San Francisco and he became a fruit.”

And it was like, they didn’t think anything about saying anything like that. It was no, this was the way it is. So I didn’t want to be that.

Gillian Frank: In Philadelphia, the stigmatization of homosexuality and the ever-present possibility of family and peer violence ensured that most gays and lesbians, especially gay and lesbian youth, kept quiet about their sexual desires. This culture of fear made it necessary for young gay and lesbian dancers on American Bandstand to remain in the closet for decades. As millions of youth tuned in to Bandstand, some gay and lesbian teens used the show to find friendship, develop self-confidence, and create a gay and lesbian community that was hidden in plain sight.

Lauren Gutterman: Bandstand began airing on weekday afternoons in Philadelphia in 1952. In 1957,  Bandstand became known as American Bandstand when the television network, ABC, began broadcasting it nationally. It quickly became one of the most important shows on television. Here's Matt Delmont:

Matt Delmont: These kinds of teen dance shows were really important for TV viewers in the 1950s, because it gave them a way to see teenagers that looked like them perform. For teenagers, it was really fun for them to have a chance to see people they might have known from school dance on television, or people who just looked like them and had the same kind of fashion sense. When American Bandstand came on, it was the first national version of these shows and so it gave people a way to think about national teenagers and talk about national teen culture for the first time.

It’s right when marketers start to discover the demographic power, the kind of financial power of teenagers, so there’s a huge market out there that all these advertisers are very eager to tap. For a show like American Bandstand, what was neat about it was, because it broadcast all across the country, you had people rushing home from school and all turning on the TV at similar times and following the same kind of dance trends, same kind of musical trends and same kind of fashion trends. Then they’ll read about it in different teen magazines, and then listening to it in different records, so it really kind of stitches together all of these different local teen groups from all across the country into something that is not homogenous in any kind of way, but it’s this kind of shared experience of watching teens dance on television and listening to the same types of music.

Lauren Gutterman: American Bandstand became popular at the very moment that television was becoming a staple feature in American homes. On average Americans watched five hours of television and participated in a national culture shaped by four national networks. Television quickly became an essential way for Americans to tell stories about themselves to each other. What television programming showed and what it didn't show shaped how viewers understood their world.

General Electric TV Salesman: Yes sir, if you want real entertainment, the best place to find it in front of a General Electric Black Daylight big as life television set. Sports, comedy, drama, news, music, yes they’re all yours merely at the turn of a dial.

Gillian Frank: As Americans brought televisions into their homes, young people became an increasingly important audience demographic. Between 1946 and 1964 American women gave birth to more than seventy-five million infants and created what was called the baby boom. When these baby-boomers reached their teenaged years they directed their parents' dollars to fashion and beauty trends, movie tickets and other forms of mass entertainment including rock 'n' roll records.

Adults worried about the impact this new youth culture had on their children's minds and behavior.

Lauren Gutterman: Adults also feared that youth culture could lead teens to a life of crime. After the FBI and other state agencies published flawed statistical studies about rising crime rates among young people, juvenile delinquency became a national crisis.

To many white, middle-class parents, rock and roll music, with its sexually suggestive lyrics and grounding in working-class and black culture threatened to create a generation of promiscuous, racially integrated, juvenile delinquents.

Gillian Frank: During the 1950s, rock and roll became the soundtrack for young people between the ages of 12 and 21 and the music industry courted this affluent younger audience.

Rock and roll musicians meanwhile celebrated their teenage audiences’ lives with songs like “Teen Angel” and “Sweet Sixteen.”

But for many critics, the sexual content and the African American roots of rock and roll were dangerous. Francis Braceland, a renowned psychiatrist called rock ’n’ roll “cannibalistic and tribalistic” in the pages of the New York Times. Writers Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer also linked rock and roll with juvenile delinquency and interracial coupling in their bestselling book U.S.A. Confidential. They warned white readers that rock and roll was black and therefore dangerous. In their words, rock and roll was “all tied up with tom-toms and hot jive and ritualistic orgies of erotic dancing, weed-smoking and mass mania, with African jungle background.”  They told their readers that in record stores, “White girls are recruited for colored lovers….”

Preacher: These men come down here from New York and from Florida to find out my reasons on Rock and Roll music and why I preach against it and I believe with all of my heart that it is a contributing factor of our juvenile delinquency of today. I 100% believe, why I believe that, because I know how it feels when you sing it. I know what it does to you, and I know the evil feeling that you feel when you sing it. I know the lust position that you get into and the beat! Well if you talk to the average teenager of today and you ask them what it is about rock ‘n’ roll music that they like. The first think they’ll say is, “The beat. The beat. The beat.”

Gillian Frank: Newspaper reports magnified these ideas with sensational stories about young people’s behavior at rock and roll concerts. From violent fights, to illicit dancing, to supposed teenaged riots, the media underscored rock and roll's harmful influence on young people.

For white adults seeking to maintain the racial and sexual order, rock and roll was a public menace that needed to be repressed. Between 1955 and 1958 cities across the United States passed legislation that banished rock and roll from concert halls, the airwaves and jukeboxes.

Lauren Gutterman: As self-appointed guardians of morality condemned rock and roll, the music industry eagerly cashed in on a 75-million-dollar-a-year teen music market. Record company executives tried to make rock and roll less threatening to white middle-class teens and their concerned parents through films like “Don’t Knock the Rock.”

At the same time, record companies attempted to whiten and desexualize rock and roll. Major record companies often had white artists produce a “cover version” of an R&B tune originally recorded by a black artist on a small independent record label. These white cover songs usually had less sexually explicit lyrics. For example, Little Richard’s 1955 song Tutti Frutti, a title which literally means “All Fruits” in Italian, originally referred to gay anal sex with lyrics that included: "Tutti Frutti, good booty / If it don't fit, don't force it / You can grease it, / make it easy." Little Richard cleaned up these lyrics for the recorded version of the song. And when Pat Boone covered this song in 1956, he dialed down the sexual innuendo even further.

Pat Boone:

I got a girl, her names sue

She know just what to do

I got a girl, her names sue

She know just what to do

I been to the east

I been to the west

But she’s the girl that I love best

Tutti Frutti, Ohh Rudy

Gillian Frank: The music industry’s efforts to sanitize youth music shaped how rock and roll appeared on television. During the 1950s, a number of local stations began airing rock and roll dance shows for teens. These shows had names like “Teenage Dance Party,” “Teen Hop” and “Teenage Party.” They featured performances by new recording artists, the latest popular records, and teen dancers who spotlighted new forms of dancing. The most popular of these shows was Bandstand, which sought to market rock and roll to white middle-class audiences by curbing its non-white and overtly sexual aspects.

American Bandstand Host: American Bandstand, brought to you by crystal clear sparkling Seven Up. Fresh clean taste, nothing does it like Seven Up that’s for sure.

Gillian Frank: American Bandstand aired on weekday afternoons drawing young audiences eager to learn about the latest dance moves, music, and fashions. Here’s bandstand dancer Ray Smith.

Ray Smith: It was 1952 and you’d come home from school and it’d be on till five. So, I just started watching it, and my friend, she and I would watch it, sometimes by telephone. I’d lay on the floor in my living room, she’d lay on the floor in hers and sometimes we wouldn’t say anything and then she would say, “I really love this song.” , “Oh is that Jerry Blavits, who is he dancing with today?”

Lauren Gutterman: Local radio personality Bob Horn served as Bandstand's host for its first four years. Horn developed the show's basic premise. There was a line-up of rock and roll songs; a select group of regular teen dancers; and a changing group of additional teens who sat in the audience and also danced on the show.

Matt Delmont: The background for American Bandstand is the studio itself, WFL studio, was set in West Philadelphia. So it was a very residential and commercial neighborhood. So before the show would even go on the air, you would have a line of teenagers standing outside sort of waiting to get in. They had a set of regulars, about a dozen, two dozen teens who were on there all the time and became kind of local stars of the show. And then they would allow usually 40 or 50 other teenagers to be in the studio. Those were often teen tour groups from other schools, sometimes other parts of the northeast or came across the country who came explicitly to see American Bandstand. You have all this energy waiting to get into the show.

It would run every afternoon Monday through Friday and it was a mix of introducing records and then having the teens dance them. They’d usually mix between a slow record and fast record. And then you would have two to three different music artists perform at each given show. But really the center point of the show was these teens dancing to the different records.

Lauren Gutterman: In 1956, Horn lost his job on Bandstand after he was arrested for drunk driving. The following year, Horn was indicted on charges of statutory rape. After Horn’s DUI, Dick Clark took over hosting duties. And in the wake of Horn’s sex scandal, Clark wanted to avoid any hint of sexual impropriety as he tried to sell rock and roll to the widest possible audience. To do so, Bandstand carefully desexualized the host, the songs, its dancers and the dancing. Here’s Bandstand dancer Ray Smith:

Ray Smith: Dick was very conscious of his mythology. In part Dick wanted us to be like little men from the 1940s, and that’s why he had us in suits, you were less threatening in a suit. There could be no facial hair on the show. There could be nothing that was, in a sense, sensual, you know, because he didn’t want that association to him. Girls could not wear anything tight. They couldn’t in anyway be sexy. You had to be so unsexy on that show. This was, I mean look at Dick, he looked like the boy next door. The way he combed his hair, his suit, there was nothing that was beyond gray or dark grey and he always looked like he was going to work in a bank.

Lauren Gutterman: Here’s Matt Delmont.

Matt Delmont: So they hired Dick Clark. He’s only 27 years old when he takes over the show so he’s not much older than the teenagers themselves. And so he just looks the part of someone who can help to bring rock ‘n’ roll and this kind of teen culture to a broader audience. It is very important once the show goes national in 1957 that he’s so telegenic and he’s so welcoming to so many different demographics, that it’s easy for him to basically sell rock ‘n’ roll to anyone who wants to buy it.

Dick Clark: While you good people make yourselves at home here, get as comfortably seated as possible. We have a very special guest coming up in the next portion of American Bandstand. This portion has been brought to you by crystal clear fresh Seven Up. A real thirst quencher, nothing does it like Seven Up.

Matt Delmont: Part of what the magic of American Bandstand was able to accomplish was taking something that was very dangerous and then packaging in a very nice way that could be sold all across the country. And that was really Dick Clark’s skill as a salesperson, as a communicator. But it did have implications in terms of what ended up on the show. They were always very concerned about anything that would be dangerous in anyway or anything that might soil the image of American Bandstand.

Lauren Gutterman: :  Fears of interracial sex which were prominent in adult anxieties about rock and roll shaped what American Bandstand would and would not show on television.

Ray Smith: In a sense, even the music he promoted was very safe. He got rid of all the race music and brought in all the covers. There’s a couple stories, one with Lloyd Price in Stagger Lee.

[Lloyd Price Plays]

Ray Smith: You know, Stagger Lee shot Billy, shot that boy. So that he went home and got a gun and shot him dead. Dick wanted him to change the lyric. Stagger Lee was a very old song and Lloyd Price was just doing it with a beat and he refused to change it and it became number one.

Matt Delmont: I think for a lot of white Americans it was dangerous because it was largely an African American derived musical form. And that in of itself was dangerous even when people were singing things that were about sex at all or anything remotely dangerous and just the very fact that African Americans were involved in it was dangerous for some people. For older generations, both white and African American, it was dangerous because it was very energetic and very youthful. So anytime you have dozens or hundreds of teenagers gathered in a place together, that’s perceived as dangerous. Then the third reason is that it was often either sexually explicit music or sexually implicit. That could come through in the lyrics of people like Big Mama Thornton on Little Richard but also because of the link to dancing. So it’s about trying to use music to get peoples bodies in motion.

The kind of dancing you saw on American Bandstand, which is much more structured and plight, I might say, was different from a lot of the dancing that ever described going on at the kind of house parties people would have. Which was, they didn’t call it grinding at the time, but it was much more kind of like the very close, very sexual touching in the home, kind of dancing that we might see going on today. That’s another reason why rock and roll was dangerous, I think it opened up a doorway to exploring boundaries in a way that a lot of people would have preferred to keep those doors closed.

Gillian Frank: American Bandstand excluded African American teens from dancing on the show. After the show began featuring live performances in 1957, producers limited interactions between African American performers and white audience members. Matt Delmont explains:

Matt Delmont: Although Dick Clark has always claimed that he integrated American Bandstand, the show’s producers used a series of tactics to try to block black teens from being able to go into the studio, without ever having the explicit policy that said you know “We’re a whites only show.” What that would look like is, this policy of having regulars on the show, which I mentioned, was in part a way to make sure they had a core group of people who were always going to be the white regulars on the show. They knew two dozen people were always going to be there, those were the regulars on the show, but they were all white. So that was one way of blocking black teens from the show.

Because people had to write in advance to request passes to get on the show, they would look by neighborhoods and by names and not allow passes to African Americans who were from Philadelphia. So they would know this is a black neighborhood, these are black names, we’re not going to issue passes to those neighborhoods, but we are going to issue passes to people who are coming from the suburbs of Philadelphia or suburbs of New Jersey. So that was another way they would do it.

Then explicitly, because they had to line up outside the door, they could visibly tell which people who were trying to get in were African American and which were white and again they would block African Americans for whatever reason they could think of either the studio was full, didn’t have the correct pass, or their dress code was off.

They used a series of these tactics to keep black teens out of the show. All with the goal of making sure they didn’t have black teens in the studio, but I think even more importantly, that they didn’t have any examples of black and white teens dancing together.

Gillian Frank: When asked about African American dancers on the show, Ray Smith shared the following.

Ray Smith: In all the years that I went, I can maybe remember one or two black kids in the entire time. And the show was in a black neighborhood, or it was a mixed neighborhood, but it was primarily black and they weren’t invited in. But also that spoke of the time.

Lauren Gutterman: Dick Clark used the record industry’s tried-and-true strategies of promoting white musicians who covered songs written and performed by African Americans. The show’s white dancers also copied dance moves that originated among African American teens.

Matt Delmont: So one of the really fascinating things about American Bandstand is it drew really heavily on African American culture, particularly African American culture in the Philadelphia area. But if you’re watching at home in Iowa or in Texas or in Nebraska where all these teens were watching. You would really have no idea that a lot of what you were seeing, the dance styles and the musical styles were coming almost wholesale from African American culture.

So I think one of the best examples of this is, there’s a show called the Mitch Thomas show, which was referred to locally as “The Black Bandstand”. It was a locally broadcast show that came out of Wilmington, Delaware, but it featured only African American teens. But what would happen is, the show would be on once a week, everyone locally in the area would watch it but then the teens who were on Bandstand would take those dances that they saw on the Mitch Thomas show and bring them back next week on American Bandstand. So American Bandstand profited off of it without really ever giving due to the black teens that created a lot of these dance moves and popularized a lot of these musical styles.

Arlene Sullivan (30:55): There wasn’t any black kids on the show, it was a black neighborhood. I don’t know why, I don’t have the answer, I really don’t, but there was a dance show in Wilmington that only black kids went to. And I thought maybe it’s because – I was so innocent – I used to think, “Well maybe they want to go to that show instead of our show.” But when you look in those lines… there wasn’t any black kids in those lines and I just don’t remember any black kids coming. That’s sad too, because when we went to the dances, they’re the ones that taught us some steps and different dances.

Gillian Frank: American Bandstand’s racially segregated foundation shaped the show’s rules for how its white teenaged dancers appeared and behaved. The logic behind these rules can be found in Dick Clark’s 1959 advice book to teens, which was called Your Happiest Years: A Frank and Friendly Book for and About Young Adults. Clark’s book, like the culture he lived in, obsessed over “masculine” and “feminine” behaviors and laid out rules for how men and women should relate to one another.

In a series of stories, Clark’s book explained to teens how to behave on dates and on the dance floor. Men, Clark explained, should be dominant and take the initiative by calling women for dates, asking them to dance, picking women up in their own cars, and later asking women to marry them. Clark echoed accepted wisdom, when he stated that women had to make sure they did nothing to undermine men’s initiatives or their masculinity. Clark wrote to his female readers, “It’s fine to be ‘one of the boys’ at certain ages. The teen age isn’t one of those times. The sports you played together when you were nine or ten belong only to him around thirteen or fourteen. You can know about them… but let him star at them. You be there to cheer and he’ll notice and appreciate that.”

Lauren Gutterman: Producers told the teens that they wanted the show to feel like an ordinary high school dance party. Typically, the white girls and boys danced in pairs. Sometimes girls danced with each other during the faster dances, but male-same-sex dancing was taboo. And dancers were, of course, prohibited from performing any type of sexually suggestive moves on the dance floor.

Ray Smith: And also in those days, women danced with women. Which used to bug me because guys could not dance with guys. One of the things that’s really interesting, when I see kids slow dance today, they do not move. Their feet go a half an inch this way, a half an inch that way. If you look at American Bandstand, we went counterclockwise around the floor. It’s the way they always slow danced, and we were very close, and Dick said, “It was the closest thing to sex with no payoff.”

Lauren Gutterman: Teenaged romance was part of the show’s appeal. And Dick Clark drew the cameras' and viewers' attention to the most wholesome, innocent-looking couples. He shone a national spotlight on these young men and women, and their straight relationships.

Ray Smith: I think the couples happened naturally, but Dick promoted the couples, because there’s no way that he didn’t know that a lot of the guys on there were gay. I’m sure he didn’t know girls, except one or two that were obvious, you know, even to me at home watching. But there were guys, and he’s around them all the time, he knew and when I started going more regularly, I was shocked at how many there were and that they didn’t hid it there. I think that’s why he promoted, Justine and Bob, Kenny and Arlene, but he sort of shone the light on them to make sure they were popular.

Gillian Frank: The media transformed these ordinary Philadelphia teens into national celebrities. Arlene Sullivan remembers that at her peak of popularity she was receiving more than 200 letters a week from teens across the country.

Arlene Sullivan: I started getting letters, from people, saying things like, “Where am I from? Do I have a boyfriend?” All these little things and I started getting letters and when I started to leave the show and go out and do the regular things like go shopping with my mom in the stores and things, people started staring at me. I didn’t know how to handle it, I used to turn to my mom and I used to say, “We have to leave.” And I got used to it. I never was different, I never changed in any kind of way, I never thought of myself as, as a start like some people would say you are, but you weren’t. You’re a reality star, okay, we were the first reality show.

Lauren Gutterman: For Bandstand’s gay and lesbian dancers participating in the show put them at risk. Frank Brancaccio recalled that boys were sometimes called “Bandstand Faggots.” Ray Smith and Arlene Sullivan both remember that high school peers threatened the male dancers with violence.

Ray Smith: Well one kid was thrown onto the elevated train tracks, another kid was thrown down the steps. I mean they were physical, and it was that thing in Philadelphia, and you didn’t know whether it was because they thought you were gay or they thought you were a big shot because you were on this big national show, you know, there was a jealously whatever.

Arlene Sullivan: We would go to dances on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Dick Clark was appearing, sometimes these boys that lived in these neighborhoods would pick on these other kids. Even the straight ones they would pick on and try to fight with them because they were on Bandstand. I basically thing that they thought they were, they were gay. They were sissy boys, you know, and they didn’t like that. I also think they were a little jealous because they got the girls, and if they only learned how to dance and not want to fight, they would have gotten the girls too.

Lauren Gutterman: Many of these young gay and lesbian dancers felt isolated and lonely because of society's views on their sexuality. Frank Brancaccio explains how American Bandstand became a means for him and other young gays and lesbians to find friends.

Frank Brancaccio: See, when you feel you’re a misfit in this world and basically lonely, you want to find your niche, you know? You want to find a place where you belong, and that’s the reason I went, because I was a kid as I said that was living in the neighborhood that he didn’t belong in. I knew I was gay, so I’d watch the show and knew instinctively, “These are people that I could make friends with.” And not so much because they’re gay, although I felt they were like me, I went to the show and refused to not be in with the in crowd.

Gillian Frank: Even though Dick Clark’s American Bandstand demanded that its dancers look and act straight in public, behind the scenes, queer teens socialized together and experimented sexually with each other.

The Bandstand dancers would meet on the show and then hang out in Rittenhouse Square where they would socialize with a broader network of gays and lesbians. Bandstand, in other words, became a steppingstone into a larger gay world.

Arlene Sullivan: Because we came from different neighborhoods, that was our meeting place, and then you got to meet, of course you got to meet, other kids who would come from other neighborhoods who weren’t a part of Bandstand and they were gay also, so you got to meet them too. And that’s when, when the boys and the girls in that park got together so I got to meet a lot of other girls, not from the show, but from other areas and I became friends with all them, and we’re all still friends to this day. We’re all friends, we’ve been friends since I was seventeen years old.

Gillian Frank: Even as Bandstand’s color line segregated black and white youth from each other, the show eroded the boundaries between white gay and straight youth. Frank Branccacio remembers that kids who now identify as straight would fool around with kids who later identified as gay. And Arlene Sullivan remembers that the tough straight kids would protect the gay kids.

Lauren Gutterman: There were rumors that Clark sent production staff to Rittenhouse Square to see if any of the dancers were hanging out there. And both Frank and Arlene suspect that Clark and his producers at some point became more hostile to gay youth and deliberately removed gay kids from the show.

It is impossible to know whether or not there was an official purge of queer youth. But this perception is in and of itself revealing. It shows that even though Bandstand became a beloved institution for many of these dancers, they knew that their sexuality marginalized them, made them expendable, and placed them on the outside of a show that became such an intimate part of their lives. Bandstand replicated the dynamics of a larger culture that both excluded black kids while allowing queer white youth to exist in public so long as they were closeted.

Gillian Frank: In 2016, the news broke that there were gay dancers on Bandstand. One headline shouted: “American Bandstand kept secret that teen stars were gay!” The reaction from fans was intense and spoke to the ongoing importance of the show.

Ray Smith: Well some of the legacy I think, people are going to hate me for saying this, I think is phony. I think that’s what’s very often overlooked is, the legacy is he brought rock ‘n’ roll to the country, he brought his versions of rock ‘n’ roll to the country. He killed a lot of rock ‘n’ roll. He killed, rock and roll is rebellious, it’s the last thing he wanted. So, the legacy of rock ‘n’ roll going out to the country, that’s Dick’s version. Pat Boone singing “Ain’t That a Shame” by Fat Domino or “Tutti Fruitti” by Little Richard. I mean, Pat Boone! He was the epitome of whiteness, down to his shoes, the white bucks. You know, and so people see that as the legacy, which I think is in a way it’s true, because he did bring that. But what they don’t see what he killed in order to get that to happen, because the only way the show would have been picked up in middle America, it had to be non-threatening. And Dick was smart enough to know it had to be non-threatening to the parents, he didn’t care about the kids. The kids liked the other stuff.

It was two summers ago, the New York Post came out with this article about gays on bandstand and a firestorm came up. One woman wrote to me on Facebook saying, “Why don’t you keep your mouth shut,” you know, “Nobody has to know this now.” And I wrote back and I said, “You know, back in 1957, 58, you loved these kids. Why suddenly in 2015, 16, you don’t love them? It makes no sense. And I think that’s the thing of the 50s, everyone calls it a simpler time, it was a simpler time on the surface, but it was not as simple. You know, it wasn’t simple if you were black, it wasn’t simple if you were gay. It certainly wasn’t simple if you were a woman. Like when you say, “When American was great.” Then!? Obviously, these people didn’t think it was great. You know, and you get tied up with the simplicity of, I think it’s the simplicity of communication is black and white. There’s no color in TV and black and white makes things very simple.

Gillian Frank: Appearing on American Bandstand was at once validating and alienating for white queer youth. To this day, it remains so for the gay and lesbian dancers who were on the show. Despite the restrictions the show placed on queer expression, behind the scenes, it created possibilities for a racially homogeneous queer community. The show allowed otherwise isolated white queer youth to find each other, to dance near each other in public, and to find support and intimacy with each other in private.

Because of their sheer numbers on the show, boys like Frank Brancaccio and Ray Smith found affirmation in one another. Their dancing skills, their youthful good-looks, their proper manners, and their charm helped to secure them a place on one of the best-rated, and most well-loved national TV shows at the time.

Lauren Gutterman: Female dancers also quietly formed queer communities on American Bandstand. Arlene Sullivan even recalled receiving love letters from girls who watched the show. Appearing on American Bandstand offered Arlene the opportunity to become the focus of other schoolgirls’ crushes and fantasies, even as it required that those queer relationships remain under wraps.

Gillian Frank: So it sounds like you met gay girls as fans.

Arlene Sullivan: Yes, oh, you don’t know.

Gillian Frank: Tell me!

Arlene Sullivan: Oh my god, this is the good part. One night I came home and there was a young teenager in my living room and I looked and I knew who she was because she wrote to me. And my mom said, “She ran away from home.” I said, “No!”

“Well that’s alright because we have her parents and they’re on their way to pick her up.”

She ran away from home to meet me. And there was another one who came to the show, I’ll never forget it, with her dad, cause we were young, I mean we were really young, I just turned 15. She came with her dad, and they were in the studio, in the back of the studio. The father introduced me and she was shaking, she was shaking. And I felt so bad. Her father said to the producer, “If I didn’t bring her here, she has to meet her, she’s going to run away.” So the father brought the kid to the show, and I met her through the years in New York because she was from Staten Island and we met each other. She was gay.

Lauren Gutterman: During the 1950s, dancing in public itself was an important act for these young gays and lesbians. It allowed them to reclaim and redefine their bodies, which American culture defined as sick, diseased, shameful and threatening. In dancing, and dancing well, on national television day after day they demonstrated their physical abilities and celebrated their physical form. These queer kids came to the show feeling ugly, inadequate and insecure. But in the eyes of their peers nationwide, and increasingly in their own eyes, they made their queer bodies beautiful.

Arlene Sullivan: And we weren’t afraid. That’s the amazing thing, here it is in the 50s, we weren’t afraid to be together, to hang out together, we used to hang out in the center part of Philadelphia. A place called Rittenhouse square which is lovely, a lovely part, and that’s where we all would meet. The boys and the girls and that’s how I got so comfortable with myself being gay, but I didn’t tell my parents or anything like that. I still dated boys and it was easy, it was easy for us because of bandstand because we lived maybe in the city, there was like 20, 25 of us hanging out together.

Lauren Gutterman: By seizing the spotlight, Arlene, Frank, Ray and others like them made themselves visible and insisted on their own cultural importance. At the same time, the show's racial restrictions ensured that black youth—whether queer or not—never had this opportunity.

Gillian Frank: Sexing History is produced by Rebecca Davis, Saniya Lee Ghanoui, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, Jayne Swift, Lauren Gutterman and me.

Our intern is Alexie Glover.

Special thanks to Frank Branccacio, Ray Smith and Arlene Sullivan for sharing their stories with us. Thank you to Matt Delmont and Marc Stein for sharing their historical expertise with us.

Lauren Gutterman: Sexing History is made possible with generous funding from a 2018 Media Production Grant from the Humanities Media Project in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, Austin. The Humanities Media Project: Their goal is to tell human stories and invite critical conversations that educate, inspire, and connect communities. They believe that the humanities play a crucial role in maintaining a healthy, democratic society.”

Gillian Frank: If you’re enjoying our show, You can help new listeners find us. Please review us on Apple Music and share us on social media.

To stay up to date on all things Sexing History or to send us a note, visit us on our website, www.sexinghistory.com

From all of us at Sexing History, thanks for listening.

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Transcription by Ian McCabe, University of Delaware