Dick Clark and American Bandstand’s Behind-the-Scenes Anti-Gay History
By Molly Lambert
Pulitzer Prize–eligible magazine The National Enquirer broke an old but interesting story this week about Dick Clark's American Bandstand. The ultra-wholesome image cultivated by Clark and his producers was unsurprisingly the result of behind-the-scenes pruning, as Clark would frequently conduct "witch hunts" to "purge gays from the ranks." After taking over Bandstand from original host Bob Horn, who had been locked up for drunk driving (and had also recently been acquitted for statutory rape), Clark built the show into a platform for himself as a host, as well as a way to introduce rock and roll to the suburbs through the medium of television. Clark has been credited with inventing modern youth culture, but also of being a cold and calculating media gangster who was backed into selling his payola shares during an investigation by the United States government in 1960.
Many of the show's male dancers were apparently gay, but had to remain extremely secretive about it lest they be ferreted out by producers and forced to resign. Tyrannical policies like these were extremely typical for the '50s and early '60s, and their acceptance was so widespread that gay dancers did not even want to risk talking about it until now. Former Bandstand regulars Frank Brancaccio and Eddie Kelly talked to the Enquirer about what really went on behind the scenes at the show. Both Brancaccio and Kelly refer to themselves as loners and misfits, who say that being on Bandstand gave them a place to feel comfortable being themselves. Well, as much themselves as Clark would allow. Although it was hush-hush, both men estimate that a lot of the male Bandstand dancers were gay, and that the homophobic straight guys they knew were well aware of this and would hurl slurs at them as they walked around public parts of town.
Kelly, now in his seventies, talks about how producers tried to bust gay dancers at popular cruising spots: "Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square was known as a meeting place for homosexuals. If you were seen in the square, you couldn't go on Bandstand. So most of us really stayed away." Most of the Bandstand dancers were Italian Americans from lower-class neighborhoods in South Philadelphia. And the local tough guy culture didn't encourage any kind of creative expressive rebellion. Brancaccio said he was drawn to Bandstand because he could sense that it would accept him for who he was. But the all-inclusive teenage utopia crafted by Clark on Bandstand was largely an illusion. In reality, the show was nearly just as strict and conservative as the world the boys wanted to escape. The most popular regulars on the show were put together to form couples that home viewers could idealize, crush on, and stan for.
If this story sounds familiar, it's because the Bandstand story is the basis for the John Waters movie Hairspray, which frames relevant socio-political issues of the time like integration with a fake Bandstand called The Corny Collins Show, relocated to Baltimore instead of Philadelphia. Bandstand was a formative show for teenagers and the not-yet-identified group now called tweens. I asked my mom, who watched the show religiously after school as a young teen, to put it in context for me, and she said it was what you watched when you were "learning to be a teenager." She also pointed out that it was on one of only three channels available at the time, and watching it after school was a daily ritual for teenagers, something MTV picked up on when it reformulated the idea in the '90s with less dancing and more teary-eyed pubescent screaming as Total Request Live. The dance show format is deathless, and it has gone through countless updates and twists: Soul Train, Solid Gold, and MTV's The Grind had Bandstand in their blood.
more
http://www.grantland.com/blog/hollywood-prospectus/post/_/id/96832/dick-clark-and-american-bandstands-behind-the-scenes-anti-gay-history
= new reply since forum marked as read
...she said that there was a definite hierarchy for kids at the show and that most of the kids who came (including her) never got within a country mile of being on camera. After that, I always loved watching the show with her (I was little at the time) to hear her smart assed remarks about the dancers. 
The father of my best friend in high school and until I was in my 30s was Dick Clark's director for years! 
PEACE! 
I beg to disagree.
"... fake Bandstand called The Corny Collins Show, relocated to Baltimore instead of Philadelphia."
No. The movie's Corny Collins Show is based on the real Buddy Deane Show.
The Buddy Deane Show is a teen dance television show, similar to Philadelphia's American Bandstand, that aired on WJZ-TV in Baltimore, Maryland from 1957 until 1964. The show was taken off the air because home station WJZ was unable to integrate black and white dancers. Its host was Winston "Buddy" Deane (1924-2003), who died in Pine Bluff, Arkansas after suffering a stroke, July 16, 2003. He was seventy-eight.
Winston "Buddy" Deane was a broadcaster for more than fifty years, beginning his career in Little Rock, Arkansas, then moving to the Memphis, Tennessee market before moving on to Baltimore where he worked at WITH-AM radio. He was one of the first disc jockeys in the area to regularly feature rock-and-roll. His dance party television show debuted in 1957 and was, for a time, the most popular local show in the United States. It aired for two and a half hours a day, six days a week.
The core group of teenagers who appeared on the show every day were known as the "Committee." Popular members of the Committee included, among others, Mike Miller, Charlie Bledsoe, Mary Lou Raines, Pat(ricia) Tacey, and Cathy Schmink. Kids on the Committee developed a huge following of fans and hangers-on in Baltimore who emulated their dance moves, followed their life stories, and copied their look. Several marriages resulted from liaisons between Committee Members.
Many of the show's performers are still around.
On ‘Hairspray’s’ 25th anniversary, ‘Buddy Deane’ Committee looks back
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/on-hairsprays-25th-anniversary-buddydeane-committee-looks-back/2013/01/17/a45a1cc2-5c23-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html
By Jessica Goldstein, Published: January 18, 2013
If you were a teenager in Baltimore in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you watched “The Buddy Deane Show.” When the final bell rang you sprinted home from school, saddle shoes smacking the sidewalk, knee socks sliding down your shins, until you skidded to a stop in front of your black-and-white TV and turned to WJZ Channel 13 to watch Maryland’s answer to “American Bandstand.” Chances are you wanted to be on “The Buddy Deane Show,” whose stars were ordinary teens turned local celebrities. The Committee, as they were known, could do all the hot dances of the day: the Madison, the mashed potato, the pony.
‘Buddy Deane’ Committee members
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/buddy-deane-committee-members/2013/01/17/b0014a96-5c32-11e2-88d0-c4cf65c3ad15_story.html
