Excerpt
Pure Innocent Fun
Welcome to the O.C., bitch.—Chris Carmack, The O.C. (2003)
White BoysSaying you read
Playboy magazine “for the articles” was a joke I heard often growing up. At the root of it was an acknowledgment that it was kind of shameful to look at pictures of naked women for pleasure, but when I first discovered porn, via vintage
Playboys my gran’s then-boyfriend Thomas used to hide in his favorite leather reclining chair, I actually was drawn in by the articles, and also the glamour of it all—the feathered hair, the campy lingerie, the visually striking photos. I was already obsessed with the divas on Gran’s daytime TV shows, and now here were divas splayed out in centerfolds. The concept of the
Playboy centerfold was prevalent in pop culture at the time. It was a thing that men looked at and teenage boys snuck behind their backs. It was lite pornography, something that turned on heterosexual boys. In the period of my adolescence, before I was willing to admit an attraction to other boys, I was convinced that my admiration for these centerfolds was an attraction to
Playboy’s Playmates.
This is why I thought my obsession with the lead of my favorite TV series,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was because I was attracted to her. And because of this, I got a subscription to
Teen People magazine so I would never miss a cover with Sarah Michelle Gellar on it. As it turned out, she appeared on exactly one
Teen People cover, the one I already had, but I discovered something else in the pages of the magazine that interested me even more than my beloved vampire slayer—a Calvin Klein ad.
In the early 2000s, Korn drummer David Silveria posed for a series of Calvin Klein ads that involved him wearing a pair of Dirty Denim jeans (knee-length jean shorts because those, unfortunately, had everyone in a choke hold then). In the ads, he’s either lying on the ground of a desert or perched under the open hood of a car. Both ads feature him with frosted blond hair and an unfortunate black soul patch, but the most important part of these ads is that he is shirtless. And if the first piece of media to ever give me an erection as a kid was a sex scene in the 1981 Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson film
Excalibur, the first one that made me realize I was gay was an ad of Silveria’s muscled body lying on the ground in the masculine version of Kate Winslet’s “draw me like one of your French girls” naked pose for Leonardo DiCaprio in
Titanic.
Then, instead of sneaking away to read the Playboy magazines hidden in the recliner, I was returning to the same copy of Teen People. Eventually, I’d move on to Tommy Hilfiger model turned singer Tyrese’s sex scene with Taraji P. Henson in the 2001 film
Baby Boy, which I rewound several times. Soon after, Tom Cruise’s 2002
Vanity Fair spread became my new Bible. The cover, a shirtless Cruise, immediately caught my attention during one of my weekly visits to Barnes & Noble at the Mayfair mall. Inside, a spread with two additional photos. In one, he flexes his biceps while gripping his tousled brown hair. In a second, his arm is behind his head, showing off his slightly hairy armpit. Since then, he has managed to remain one of our few lasting A-list movie stars—judging from the wild success of the
Mission: Impossible franchise, the fact that
Top Gun: Maverick seemingly brought a pandemic-ravaged box office back to life, and his dizzying skydiving stunt at the 2024 Olympics closing ceremony. Given his long-standing association with the creepy cult of Scientology, this fame has to be in part thanks to that 2002
Vanity Fair spread.
Every recent generation has a moment when they fell in love with Tom Cruise. Gen Xers have Cruise in tighty-whities in
Risky Business and his soft-core sex scene with Kelly McGillis in the original
Top Gun. Millennials have him shouting “Show me the money!” at Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire. Gen Z has his death-defying stunts in recent
Mission: Impossible films. For me, it’s the
Vanilla Sky era, when he divorced Nicole Kidman and began his rebrand as a hot nearly forty-year-old sex symbol. What was so enamoring about this white man with perfect teeth and beautiful hair? Well, for one, he had the biggest cosign of them all—Oprah.
I blame Oprah for many things, which I’ll get to later in this book, but I’ll say I’m thankful for the yearslong obsession with Cruise I’ve been given. It’s hard out here for a Cruise fan. On the one hand, he’s part of an evil cult. On the other, most of the films in his forty-year career are masterpieces, the majority of which belong in the Criterion Closet:
Jerry Maguire, Interview with the Vampire, Minority Report, The Color of Money, The Firm, Magnolia, Legend, Eyes Wide Shut, every single
Mission: Impossible film (except the second, which is possibly John Woo’s worst American film, which I guess is my coming-out as a
Paycheck fan, but I find it very hard to resist the charms of Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman),
Edge of Tomorrow, Collateral, Vanilla Sky, War of the Worlds, Tropic Thunder, American Made, and maybe even
Knight and Day—who’s to say?
We can walk and chew gum at the same time. We don’t have to lie that Cruise has never made a good film just because he maybe (probably) knows something about Shelly Miscavige’s disappearance (this is absolutely a joke). Morally dubious people make great art all the time. Justin Timberlake’s
Justified is a great album, for instance. When Los Angeles was locked down due to the pandemic, I rewatched
Jerry Maguire for the first time in years. I always knew it was a fantastic film (Cameron Crowe’s best to me, but I know
Almost Famous stans would riot if such an opinion were the general consensus), but I was unprepared for how utterly moved I would be. I’m sure it was in part from a lack of human contact during lockdown, but I truly uncontrollably sobbed on my couch watching not just the “you complete me” scene but also when Cuba Gooding Jr. survives what appears to be a life-threatening injury in the third act and embraces Cruise after his victory. Granted, I’ve sobbed at every Pixar movie since
WALL•E, but that doesn’t make my emotions any less real.
Unfortunately, there’s just something mesmerizing about this short man who appears tall in his films and his perfect smile that seems to betray a near-psychotic evil brimming just beyond his porcelain veneers. For some, their unconscious uncoupling with Cruise began with Scientology and him leaping onto a couch on
The Oprah Winfrey Show. On May 23, 2005, during an interview with Oprah where Cruise was supposed to be promoting Steven Spielberg’s
War of the Worlds remake, he spent the entire time talking about his new girlfriend, Katie Holmes, like your best friend does when they’re drunk and just met a guy last night who they believe is the love of their life. (They’ll never speak of this person again the next morning—or maybe that’s just me.) This entire interview is key to understanding Oprah’s ringleader, cultlike hold over Americans in the early 2000s and how big of a star Cruise was then. Before Cruise sets foot on Oprah’s stage, she is commanding an audience of screaming, gasping women in near ecstasy. If you weren’t a regular Oprah watcher in the show’s heyday and only saw it through this clip, then you would be forgiven for mistaking the energy in the room as Cruise fandom. But actually, it was Oprah fandom. And since she’s left the talk show behind and begun the “respectable elder” portion of her career, what’s gone is the literal insanity that used to surround her. It was parodied constantly before Cruise’s interview.
Here was a Black woman born into poverty in rural Mississippi who had become the most famous woman in media, perhaps one of the biggest celebrities in the world, and every day, you could tune in to see white women screaming in adulation at her presence. If it was the holiday season and she was handing out cars? You might think you were watching a human sacrifice in Midsommar. She addresses these women who have traveled to their version of Mecca in Chicago to see her and have just discovered that the guest on the show that day is Cruise. “Okay, you are all gonna have to calm down,” Oprah says with a sly smile, almost toying with the audience. She did this often, whether it was teasing a guest or teasing the fact that they might get a new car (she became so famous for handing out cars to audience members that her screaming, “You get a car! You get a car!” has been forever ingrained into casual pop-culture slang). “Y’all are gonna have to calm yourselves or you won’t make it through the hour, I’m telling you, because . . .” And then she said, with her usual delivery of a deep, drawn-out shout, “He’s in the building!”
The camera cuts to white women screaming, gasping for air, hugging one another through tears like an alternate reality in which Hillary Clinton won the presidency in 2016. Oprah has everyone in the audience take a Lamaze-class deep breath and then gets on with the business of introducing Cruise, but not before teasing them all once more by bringing up his “new love” and saying, “I must say, I was hanging out with the new couple the other day . . . at my Legends Ball.” One thing Oprah is really good at is name-dropping her celebrity friends, but it always comes back to Oprah! Forget Madame Web; it’s Oprah who connects them all.
