‘Rebel Without a Cause’ Gave Us Hollywood’s First Gay Teenager and a Tragic End
Share
There’s little doubt that actor Sal Mineo’s character of Plato who he played opposite James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause was Hollywood’s first gay teenager.
Early in Rebel Without a Cause, Sal Mineo’s Plato spots James Dean’s Jim in the school hallway, the morning after they’ve had a chance encounter while being booked at the local police station. Plato sees Jim’s reflection in a mirror hung on his locker door, immediately above a glamour shot of the actor Alan Ladd.
It’s a way to show that Plato will soon worship Jim the same way he idolizes a movie star, sure. But for gay audiences—both at the time and now—it’s one of many unspoken but crystal-clear indications that Plato is drawn to Jim as more than just a father figure. Mineo, who was 16 years old when Rebel opened, later called Plato “the first gay teenager in films.” Speaking candidly in a 1972 interview, in which he also joked about having “a girl in every port—and a couple of guys in every port too,” Mineo continued: “You watch it now, you know he had the hots for James Dean. You watch it now, and everyone knows about Jimmy, so it’s like he had the hots for Natalie [Wood] and me. Ergo, I had to be bumped off, out of the way.” It was in an early audition for Rebel, according to a biography of Mineo by Michael Gregg Michaud, that Dean offered director Nicholas Ray a now famous bit of direction: “Tell Sal to look at me the way Natalie looks at me.”
Plato dies, pointlessly shot by the police, at the end of Rebel Without a Cause, and Mineo’s story ends tragically too—after earning two Oscar nominations for Rebel and 1960’s Exodus, he struggled to transition into an adult career. “The prevailing winds around Sal in the early ’60s were anything but favorable,“ says Peter Bogdanovich in the Mineo biography. Bogdanovich, a writer for Esquire before he became an acclaimed director, interviewed Mineo on the set of John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn, crediting Mineo for his “quick wit and infectious self-mockery,” but acknowledging the double-edged sword of Mineo’s early success: “The old established snobs in Hollywood could never quite forgive him his teenage popularity.”
Mineo was stabbed to death at the age of 37 in 1976, in a situation that was most likely a robbery gone wrong but has still garnered plenty of speculation over the years. But his legacy lives on powerfully in Rebel Without a Cause, in which he plays Plato as a boy learning before our eyes how powerful his feelings for another man can be—most likely because Mineo himself was doing the exact same thing. “I had no idea or understanding of affection between men,” Mineo later said of an early screen test with Dean, which can still be seen on YouTube. “And for the first time, I felt something strong.”
This week’s Little Gold Men podcast kicks off a special Pride Month series of Oscar flashbacks, in which we’ll discuss films with a connection to the Oscars that also have a significant place in queer film history. (If you’d like to watch along with us, the next four weeks will feature discussion of BPM, In & Out, Pariah, and Moonlight.)
