‘Boys Beware' (shown below) is one example of a genre of 'educational' media known as 'social guidance' films, which had their heyday in the fifties. One key figure was the late Sid Davis (1916-2006), who was something of an entrepreneur within this field. Initially, Davis was motivated by altruism. In 1949, six-year-old Linda Glucroft had been sexually abused and murdered by one Fred Swoble. Until then, Davis had been a film stuntperson, and borrowed one thousand dollars from his friend John Wayne to make a 'stranger danger' warning and instructional film for children and young adolescents. ‘Dangerous Stranger' proved to be a hit amongst police departments and schools, and Davis made a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar profit. He went into business as Sid Davis Enterprises, and made numerous 'instructional' films for his target audience. Most of them dealt with laudable subjects like home safety, driver safety, youth gang membership and anti-drug awareness. Sometimes, the results could be unintentionally amusing. For example, ‘Live and Learn' involved numbers of hapless small children failing to heed safety warnings and impaling themselves on scissors, falling off cliffs and suffering simulated eye damage. And as this was the period of the ‘Reefer Madness' anti-pot moral panic, ‘Seduction of the Innocent' tells us that 7-Up and uppers lead to pot lead to heroin addiction, street prostitution, a criminal career and death before twenty-five! In 1961, Davis made ‘Boys Beware', which misrepresented gay men as paedophiles. Jimmy is picked up by Ralph, who wears sunglasses, is bald and has a tacky moustache. But Ralph "suffers" from a "contagious and infectious" disease that is even worse than "smallpox." He takes Jimmy to a hotel room, Jimmy reports him and gets probation, while Ralph gets imprisoned. It is worth noting that Sid Davis was uneducated, but made a fortune out of the lucrative Los Angeles property market as well as his instructional films, took up mountain climbing, and became a multimillionaire. At the same time, he made ‘Girls Beware', which deals with the allegedly negative consequences of heterosexual 'promiscuity,' leading to being surprised by a criminal on Lovers Lane with one's sweetheart while kissing, and being raped as a result. Mercifully, there was no lesbian equivalent of ‘Boys Beware'. As for ‘Boys Beware', I am unaware whether it ever screened in New Zealand during the period in question, as the New Zealand Bibliographic Database shows no New Zealand holdings for its reference within any New Zealand library, at least any online. It also seems to have eluded the scrutiny of educational historians, as I could find no academic journal references in the Index New Zealand database. While it might seem amusing to contemporary gay sensibilities, we should remind ourselves that ‘Boys Beware' and other antigay media imagery reinforced uninformed homophobic folk myths about gay "sexual predators" and contributed to police brutality, harassment and psychiatric abuse in the fifties and sixties, and even later. It was still being distributed by AIMS Instructional Media (Glendale, California) in 1980, according to New Zealand Bibliographic Database records! For lesbians and gay men of that time, these social misguidance films produced damaging outcomes for individuals and our communities alike. Recommended: Ken Smith: Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films: 1945- 1970: New York: Blast Books: 1999. Craig Young - 14th November 2006