Abstract
In 1973, Andrew Tobias (writing under the pseudonym John Reid) published The Best Little Boy in the World, a personal memoir of his childhood and self-discovery as a gay man. In it, he explains, “Of course, through all these shining performances I was feeling less than entirely adequate … But it was more than that: it was the basic understanding—that sick, guilty feeling in the deepest recesses of my psyche—that I was a phony. I was not the best little boy in the world as my parents thought.”1
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Notes
John Reid, The Best Little Boy in the World (New York: Putnam, 1973), 5.
Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing up Gay in a Straight Man’s World (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2006), 30.
Jack Babuscio, “The Cinema of Camp (aka Camp and the Gay Sensibility),” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002 ), 121.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover, 1994), 2.
Joan Riviere, “Womanliness as a Masquerade,” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 10 (1952): 303–13.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 15.
Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 15.
See Roy S. Simmonds, The Two Worlds of William March (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1984), and Ellen Showalter, “Introduction,” in The Bad Seed, by William March (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), v–xiii.
William March, The Bad Seed (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 39.
Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood (New York: First Ballantine Books, 1972), 82.
Chuck Jackson, “Little, Violent, White: The Bad Seed and the Matter of Children,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 28.2 (2000): 69.
Stephani Etheridge Woodson, “Mapping the Cultural Geography of Childhood: Or, Performing Monstrous Children,” Journal of American Culture 22.4 (1999): 31–43.
James Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 79.
Jerold Simmons, “The Production Code under New Management: Geoffrey Shurlock, The Bad Seed, and Tea and Sympathy,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 22.1 (1994): 10.
Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 10.
Laura Mulvey, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,” Movie 25 (Winter 1977/78). Reprinted in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 76.
Alexander Doty, “‘My Beautiful Wickedness’: The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy,” in Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (London: Routledge, 2000), 55.
Elizabeth Gazik, “The Queer Sort of Fandom for Heavenly Creatures: The Closeted Indigence, Lesbian Islands, and New Zealand National Cinema,” in Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 47–62.
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© 2015 Andrew Scahill
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Scahill, A. (2015). Malice in Wonderland. In: The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481320_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137481320_3
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