“All About the Boys”

October 01, 2007

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We saw this interview with “The Outsiders” author S.E. Hinton and wound our way down memory lane about reading the novel for the first time. Oh, the uncomfortable tension. It’s not necessarily a gay novel, but boy, if we didn’t feel a certain eye-opening. The film is an entirely different story: Ralph Maccio, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze? Give us a break. It’s gay-teen-boy gold.

A 40th anniversary edition of ''The Outsiders'' has just been published and the Associated Press published a pretty great intereview with Hinton, now 59, in the library of Will Rogers High School, the very room where she worked on parts of her novel.

''I was exhilarated,'' she recalls about that time. ''I remember the buzz, the feeling like you're burning up.''
As a student, Hinton once received a ''D'' in creative writing, but she is now an honored alumna of Will Rogers, her picture displayed behind a glass case to the right of the library, along with such other notables as musician David Gates and singer Anita Bryant. Hinton rarely goes to the high school, but students apparently still like her books enough to steal them, according to librarian Carrie Fleharty.

''I can't keep them on the shelves,'' she says with a laugh. ''The kids keep taking them out and 'forgetting' to bring them back.''

''The Outsiders'' is the raw, but hopeful story of rival gangs that features narrator Ponyboy Curtis, the bookish greaser who can quote Robert Frost; macho Dallas Winston, blue eyes ''blazing ice, cold with a hatred of the whole world''; and little Johnny Cade, a ''dark puppy that has been kicked too many times.''

''I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows,'' Hinton wrote in the novel. ''Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better.''

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