For more than half a century, a debate over the star's sexuality has failed to fade. Isn't it time we embraced the truth?
 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. "I wasn't worried about what nobody had to say to me about nothing anyway—I worried about the bull." The staple of WFH style isn't going anywhere. Front navy flat-fronts to tapered fits in khaki, the Everything Store has all the styles you're looking for—and at a bargain, too. Powerful silencing tech meets a powerfully good discount. After years of hysteria about free speech on college campuses, state legislatures are actually trying to police what people can discuss in schools. During the summer of the 1994 World Cup, Colombia's star keeper was the go-between in a drug hostage situation. When he then stood trial for taking part in a kidnapping, Esquire sent a reporter to investigate what is now one of the greatest what-ifs in the country's history. |
