Late in the evening on September 30, 1955, screenwriter William Bast sat at his typewriter in his cramped L.A. apartment surrounded by suitcases, banging out a movie outline. The next morning, he planned to carry those suitcases out to Sherman Oaks, where James Dean, his best friend and onetime lover, had invited him to move in together in a large rented house.
As Bast told the story decades later, after a long, confusing courtship, full of starts and stops, denials and doubts, Dean wanted them to live together as partners and lovers, not just as friends. Around sunset, the phone rang with the news that Dean, just 24, was dead—killed when his Porsche collided with another car in the California desert. Bast dropped the phone and fell out of his chair, blacking out at the news.
For half a century after, he carefully guarded Dean’s reputation, forcefully denying increasingly insistent rumors about the sexuality of the most famous movie star in the world and the idol of millions. In death, Dean would become the perfect celebrity—a silent one—onto whom generations could project their fantasies and themselves.
Death delivered Dean the fame, the love, and the acclaim he struggled to achieve in life. So famous is the photo of him leaning against a wall in blue jeans that he is credited with making jeans the American uniform.
More than 65 years later, he remains omnipresent in pop culture. His face sells everything from blue jeans to cars to luxury watches. Photos of him walking through New York or lazing in a cowboy hat hang from countless college guys’ dorm room walls. Generations of young actors have competed to be “the next James Dean.”
Lookalikes from the young Martin Sheen to Luke Perry to KJ Apa have dominated Hollywood for half a century. A porn star even borrowed his moniker. Dean’s name appears in more popular songs than almost any other, from David Essex’s classic “Rock On” to the Jonas Brothers’ “Cool.” This spring, Kaskade released another one, “New James Dean.” It’s an extraordinary run at the top for someone who was last alive when Joe Biden was entering puberty and whose body of work consists largely of three movies, only one of which most could even name. His last movie, Giant, hit theaters sixty-five years ago this fall.
Pop culture has endlessly reimagined James Dean from the moment he died—he is straight, bisexual, and gay; sensitive and aggressive; misunderstood and manipulative; victim and predator; the best of us and the worst.
As new information slowly emerged over the decades, and social attitudes changed, so, too, did the mix of man and myth passing under the “James Dean” name. Only now, with a new generation rejecting old assumptions about gender roles and sexuality—one in six members of Gen Z self-identify as queer, according to a recent Gallup survey—is it possible to see James Dean as he really was.
We can see just how much he, more than any other star of the twentieth century, pointed the way toward modern masculinity. And we can see how heavily previous generations censored and censured his legacy to try to tame its radical potential.
To write about him now is to describe Gen Z seventy years early. A recent study by the ad firm Bigeye found 50 percent of Gen Z describe traditional gender binaries as outdated, and James Dean had already blurred that line in the oppressive heart of the 1950s. He loved both sports and theater, motorcycles and making art. He was self-centered and narcissistic but befriended marginalized people. He was arrogant but wracked with self-doubt. He took countless selfies in the mirror and performed outrageous stunts for the midcentury version of likes. He wasn’t afraid to cry.
On screen, he could convey thunderous emotion with a glance, his performances erupting with tears and screams and howls, a raw vulnerability few young men had ever seen someone their age express.
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