James Dean: The Secret Life of an American Rebel

A fresh and long-overdue reassessment of James Dean, examining his life and legacy as a queer man.

Although he died at a heartbreakingly young age and appeared in only a handful of movies, James Dean revolutionized American manhood. As a celebrity and icon, he melded vulnerability with determination, sensitivity with strength, in a way that offered a bracing and--for some--threatening new vision of masculinity. His massive influence and the fascination he has always inspired are inseparable from his identity as a queer man whose complex sexuality shattered the norms of midcentury American society. (When asked whether he was a homosexual, he reportedly said, ＂I’m certainly not going through life with one hand tied behind my back.＂)

Today, even though it is widely accepted that Dean was gay or bisexual, the story of his life and personal character continue to be colored by the prejudices of an earlier era and the work of often unscrupulous biographers and journalists. Drawing on exhaustive new research (including more than four hundred previously secret pages of Dean’s personal and business records), Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean is a revelatory reassessment of the man and his legacy. Free from sensationalism--but unafraid to confront the difficult facts of Dean’s life--it deploys modern insights into sexual diversity to transform our understanding of James Dean’s story, and the stories of boys and men like him.

Jason Colavito is a writer whose work has appeared in major magazines like Esquire and The New Republic. He has been interviewed widely in media that include CNN, the BBC, The New York Times, Discovery Network documentaries, and many others. He is the author of several critically acclaimed nonfiction titles, including Legends of the Pyramids (Red Lightning/Indiana UP, 2021), The Mound Builder Myth (Oklahoma UP, 2020), and The Cult of Alien Gods (Prometheus, 2005).