Boys Beware, the old ‘guidance film’ that got a Ray-Pec teacher suspended, still hilarious after all these years

Yesterday, KCTV Channel 5 reported that a veteran teacher at Raymore-Peculiar High School, Ken Simon, had been suspended for showing students in his law-enforcement class a 10-minute film from 1961 called Boys Beware. The KCTV story quotes Simon as saying that the film was “made in 1959 as a PSA by Inglewood [California] police.”

The Inglewood police helped, but the film was actually made by Sid Davis Productions as what was in those days called a “social guidance film.” Many such films were produced in the late 1950s and 1960s, including camp classics with dubious educational value such as Dos and Don’ts of Dating and Are You Popular?

Boys Beware, the quickie that got Simon in hot water, is no quaint little Are You Popular? It’s a film warning young men against the homosexual menace in their communities, and I still remember being made to watch it in school in the 1970s.

The homosexuals in the movie are predatory men of a certain age, seen prowling around high schools, wearing dark glasses and looking for sexually awkward (but kind of butch) underage boys. To, you know, molest them. This remains the kind of figure that still represents all gay men to, say, Pat Robertson.

When my school showed Boys Beware, I was a sexually awkward but not very butch teenager. The first time it was screened, I thought it was terrifying. The second time, I found the movie hilarious.

The first screening for me was with the boys in my eighth-grade class — only the boys, the girls having been herded to another classroom to watch a very different film, Girls Beware, also by Sid Davis Productions and also made in 1961. (The menace in the girls’ movie wasn’t, as you might picture, horny lesbians but plain old “bad situations”: accepting car rides from strangers, special problems in modern babysitting, certain issues that come with dating older boys.

Boys Beware was creepy the first time I saw it because I was clueless and barely understood what was going on. When the predatory gay man showed “Jimmy” a packet of photos he’d pulled out of the glove compartment of his Chevrolet, I was lost. Why, after Jimmy looked at the photos, did they go to a hotel? It was daylight. They couldn’t have been tired.

A classmate of mine, a lot more sophisticated than me, had to fill me in: “The guy showed Jimmy dirty pictures,” worldly Eddie explained to me. “And then he took him to a hotel and raped him.”

I had nightmares for a week.

Flash forward to sophomore year at an all-boys Catholic high school. We were all more worldly then. A whole thuggish group of us had slipped through the back exit door of the Vogue Theater to watch Deep Throat, and I finally understood sex. Sort of. The Brothers of the Holy Cross had arranged a screening of Boys Beware, and it seemed now ancient and much, much funnier. Also, the predatory gays in the movie didn’t seem all that different from some of the teachers in the school.

Meanwhile, the situations in the film were pretty far-fetched by 1972 standards — though not as ridiculous as the wild vignettes in the 34-minute anti-drug movie screened the previous week, Marijuana, narrated by Sonny Bono (who certainly seemed stoned to me) wearing a Nehru jacket. That’s the film in which a cute girl on a bad “pot trip” drives her convertible over a cliff. My classmates, many quite high at the time, roared with laughter.

The KCTV story reports: “Ken Simon says he used the YouTube video to show just how much attitudes about homosexuality have changed over the years.”

Uh huh.

Maybe they haven’t changed so much in Raymore-Peculiar.