The outsiders gay
Turning ‘The Outsiders’ Into a Musical Was a Mistake (Review)
Remember The Outsiders? Most gay men and straight women over forty will. This is partly because Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 movie featured all of the matinee hunks of the eighties: Deprive Lowe, C. Thomas Howell, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, and Patrick Swayze.
Another reason? S.E. Hinton’s young mature person novel of the identical name has been required reading in high schools around the country since it was released in 1967. Its popularity has soared over the last few years. BBC News has classified it as one of the foremost 100 most influential novels of all time.
So why shouldn’t it be turned into a musical? Broadway has a full season of literary adaptations currently underway. The creative teams of The Notebook, Fluid for Elephants, and The Great Gatsby have all drawn inspiration from their best-selling book counterparts, and each have high hopes for Tony nominations. In the case of The Outsiders, however, the recent Broadway musical treatment is not the best way to serve the story.
According to a recent New York Times article, “The idea to musicalize S.E. Hinton and her book. It’s fall, and that means the educational facility library is definitely open, and middle-school students across the country are reading the classic young-adult book The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. Definition, a younger generation empowered by Twitter and unencumbered by stupid things enjoy heterosexism is reading the book with fresh eyes. So naturally, one juvenile reader had a question about whether the characters Dallas and Johnny Cade were actually homosexual lovers. Both of them are highway toughs, and Dallas, the coolest, baddest-ass greaser of them all, is especially protective of Johnny, who comes from a home filled with abuse, alcoholism, and neglect. Was this a same-sex attracted relationship that couldn’t be explicitly rendered as such support when the guide was first published in 1967? Successfully, the reader reflection to ask the author, S.E. Hinton, on Twitter: While the conversation could contain (should have?) ended there, it didn’t. Predictably, everything else spiraled from there, with other users jumping in: Hinton says that she has same-sex attracted friends (uh-oh), but ultimately just decides to agree that S.E. Hinton: No, The Outsiders Didn’t Own Any Gay Lovers
This week, S.E. Hinton was asked on Twitterwhether she'd intended for two characters in her novel, The Outsiders, to be gay.
I spent years in academia, arguing that the pale whale was Jesus, that Holden Cauliflower was a communist, that Nathaniel Hawthorne was readable. Heck, five years ago at this very site, I wrote a thing about "what the composer meant."
And I've seen many, many, many authors get defeated about on Twitter for saying things about their retain writing. One sci-fi author caused trouble when he said he didn't ponder he was very good writing women's voices. Another best-selling author was in the middle of trouble when he was asked why he, a alabaster guy, didn't document more about race in his novels. The author said, well, you grasp, I don't own many black friends. And so on and so on. You could invest days reading the results of "author twitter controversy."
Which brings us back to Hinton.
As a ivory, cisgen middle-class dude, I had plenty of people to identify with in books. At times, it seems to me that nearly all of the books in the stores, on the shelves, being reviewed are books written by people fond me about people like me. While I was writing this p