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Whenever the expression "teen idol" is invoked, it's usually followed by sayings like "screaming girls" or "squealing, pubescent females". What's almost always left out of the equation is that screaming boys are out there too, often being ushered into their sexuality by the sight of fetching looking male singers whose rotating pelvises are squarely aimed at the teen market.

Traditionally, teen idols are cute, wispy, and androgynous, so they're appealing without being all that threatening. But they're sexy--to members of all genders. And throughout the years, many of them were gay themselves--though in the days of Roddy McDowall, George Maharis, and Richard Chamberlain, that certainly wasn't spoken (except when Maharis was busted for soliciting sex from a man in a Shell Station in 1974. His teenie days were long gone by then anyway. So were Chamberlain's when he came out at 69.)

Whatever their sexuality, teen idols tend to exude sexuality in ways that make pulses race and knees buckle, even when it's done with subtle suggestion. When I came of age in the 1960s and beyond, TV's Tarzan, Ron Ely, helped me swing into puberty on a very long vine. I couldn&#

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