![]() The minister’s readings came from the Bible, citing the repulsive truth of same-sex attraction. It was a lonely, vulnerable existence.Ĭondemnations of homosexuality came from the pulpit of the Protestant Church on Sunday mornings, an abomination, an affliction cursed as nothing more sinful, nothing more damned. I was convinced no one felt the way I did. I could not yet put a name to what I was experiencing, nor could I risk revealing such feelings to anyone. I tried not to look, learning the tricks of catching quick glances of developing male bodies. There was no worse fate than to be labeled a faggot. My peers’ cutting remarks warned of harsh reprisal if anyone leered at them in the wrong way. The jokes in the school locker room were abundant and the threats persisted. I had something to prove to my peers, but the real truth remained hidden away. Not fitting this projected image, I denied my true self, burying my feelings and hiding behind a straight façade of dates with female classmates and rugged games of street football. They were mocked, held in utter contempt. The images of male homosexuals portrayed on television and film screens during my younger years are remembered for their blatant stereotypes, gay men depicted as weak, effeminate, predatory. In 1968, in my small midwestern town, I had nothing within reach to attach my emerging feelings. Outwardly, I could not share my own longings, disclosure a sure recipe for swift and adverse retribution. Inwardly, though, I did not feel their pining. So, why was I so enraptured by Romeo? My affections should have been directed towards Juliet, congruent with my friends’ youthful, libidinous desires. I did nothing to counter their remarks, smiling and nodding in endorsement. As we made our way home from the theater, they were vocal in their yearnings for young Juliet. My male peers were struck by Hussey’s features – her silken complexion, lively brown eyes, fully developed form. Their acting prowess, vibrant and unspoiled, was widely applauded, though their physical virtues caught the preponderance of the glowing affirmation of moviegoers. The newcomers were thrust into the public eye. Olivia Hussey had barely reached fifteen when she became Juliet Leonard Whiting, the film’s Romeo, was two years older. ![]() Selected for the leads were two unknowns, two teenagers who, under Zeffirelli’s watchful casting eye and adamant insistence, matched the youthful ages of the doomed lovers in Shakespeare’s play. Ablaze with personal passions, the actors all lend character to the richly figured tapestry Zeffirelli has woven in brilliant color.” Film critic Judith Crist gushed over it: “A beautiful picture sparing no lavish or literal detail. On a Saturday in the fall of my sixteenth year, my junior year of high school, I sat with friends in the darkened theater, transported back in time by a feature recently released to high acclaim – Director Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Movies were a staple, a constant in our young lives. Meeting friends for a movie on Saturday afternoons was a ritual dating back to our elementary school years. Though I went home that afternoon enraptured by my first realized movie crush, I vigilantly guarded my feelings from others. ![]() I had remained silent in concealing my emerging and persistent-and terrifying-affection for the male form. I was sixteen in 1968, when I first saw him. His features were accentuated by alluring period attire–fitted pants, and a ruffled shirt, and rounded nobleman’s cap. His entrance into the film, sauntering up a narrow, walled walkway of the fourteenth-century Italian city, Verona, the movie’s setting, held my full attention. My eyes went to him, there on the screen of the movie theater of my youth. His beauty was hypnotic, his presence striking. Director Franco Zeffirelli (right) talking to Olivia Hussey ‘Juliet’ (center) and Leonard Whiting ‘Romeo’ (right).
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