Brad Renfro
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Brad Renfro |
Websites are a relatively inexpensive and effortless way for young actors and musicians to reach a worldwide audience, and as a marketing tool they've become as commonplace as music videos or in-store autograph signings. But it's one thing for a management company or record label to create a website for a budding young star. Amateur websites are something else again. You would think these websites - lovingly devoted to the worship of teenage boys, from actors like Brad Renfro and Devon Sawa to musical groups like the Backstreet Boys and N'Sync - would be created and maintained by the sort of boy-crazy pubescent girls who once exorcised their hormones by screaming their lungs out for the Beatles (or the Monkees, or the Bay City Rollers, or Hanson, or whatever the era served up.) But surprisingly, many of the best teen-idol websites devoted to young male stars are run by other boys (or, quite possibly, grown men posing as teenagers; the Internet, after all, offers an anonymity that surpasses even the corner newstand).
The rampant homoeroticism - suggested if not implicit in many of these webpages - has spawned a renaissance in the barechested star photo, sometimes posed, sometimes 'captured' from video - a cultural artifact that most pop culture devotees probably believe died when Matt Dillon - the sine qua non of shirtless pinup boys - graduated from teenybopper to adult roles.
Dillon was arguably the first modern teen idol whose career was manufactured by his barechested poses in the teen magazines; it was a well-planned marketing campaign that insured that by the time Dillon's breakthrough film Little Darlings opened in theaters, millions of teenaged girls would already be obsessed with his looks. Today, that same strategy has made teen actors like Brad Renfro and Devon Sawa much hotter commodities on the Internet than their tepid box-office receipts would lead you to believe. The big stars on the teen idol websites are the boys who will take their shirts off in front of the camera.
But don't get the idea that every teen idol website is obsessed with catching a peek at Brad Renfro's nipples or Jonathan Taylor Thomas' underarm hair, though; some, like the Lost In The Stars site and the YMS Home page, comprise meticulously constructed archives of photos culled from magazines, the web, and video, without the prurient focus that consumes the 'shirtless' websites.
Here's a quick rundown of some of the most popular and well-constructed teen idol websites. Usenet fans will also want to keep an eye on alt.binaries.pictures.teen-idols and alt.fan.teen.idols, prime sources for shirtless pinup pix.
Shirtless Teen Idols - The name says it all, from Scott Baio to Zybich Trofimiuk
Lost In The Stars - One of the classiest & most extensive teen idol websites
Shirtless Teen Stars 4 U 2 Enjoy - Pages and pages of shirtless teens, from TV, film, and pop music
Young Male Stars (YMS) Homepage - A beautiful site with sections devoted to the teen stars of today, yesterday, and tomorrow, as well as exclusive interviews and film reviews
Star Galaxy - An impressive collection of young male performers, many virtually unknown, mostly from video captures.
The AJ Scan Collection - A limited collection of video-captures and scanned pinups based in England, so the selection of teen stars is a bit different.
Dream Teens - A sizable collection of teen idol pix, and one of the only such sites with an admittedly gay focus; this website includes links to gay-teen support groups and includes a gay youth magazine.
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