‘BANDSTAND’S CLOSET
’60s TV show hid stars’ sexuality
When cute young teenagers Arlene Sullivan and Kenny Rossi slow danced together on “American Bandstand” back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, kids across the country swooned.
They wrote thousands of letters. They joined Arlene’s and Kenny’s fan clubs. The big teenybopper magazines of the era — Sixteen and Teen — plastered “Bandstand” dancers on their covers and wrote glowing, gossipy stories about their lives in Philadelphia, where Dick Clark produced the show.
Five-foot-two, brown-eyed, brown-haired Arlene and handsome Kenny, a year younger, were among the TV music show’s elite, its stars, the vaunted “regulars” along with another couple often on camera — pert, blond Justine Carrelli and suave Bob Clayton.
They were the squeaky-clean Kardashians of their era, and “Bandstand” could easily claim the title as the first reality show. Millions of kids from Brooklyn to Beverly Hills ran home from school every weekday to watch them dance, imitate their styles and fantasize about their lives.
What they didn’t know was that Arlene and several of the other female dancers, and most of the handsome teen boys, were gay.
Clark, known as America’s oldest teenager, knew. But he feared that if the show’s secret ever came out, Middle America would turn the channel.
“I knew I was different early on, but being with all these [‘Bandstand’] friends, I came to terms with my feelings. I kissed a girl, and I liked it!” Sullivan, now 74 and long out of the closet, reveals in a fascinating self-published book, “Bandstand Diaries” — billed as “The Book You’ve Waited Over 50 Years to Read!”
Sullivan’s co-author, Ray Smith, recently retired after 40 years as an Emmy-winning “Today” show producer. But back in the “Bandstand” days, Smith was one of the show’s secretly gay dancers.
He debuted in Studio 3B at WFIL-TV, near the El train stop in West Philadelphia, in 1956 when he was a 13-year-old juniorhigh-school student. He would dance on the show until early 1960.
And while Smith knew he was gay, he was “shocked” to learn that “most of the guys on ‘Bandstand,’ so many of them, were gay,” he told The Post. “And the one thing that really shocked me was that those boys who were 14 and 15 and 16 were sleeping with each other.”
Clark was “determined” to keep the homosexuality of popular “Bandstand” regulars a secret, Smith said. Years later, when Clark was asked whether any of the dancers had died of AIDS, he stated that one had, Smith recalled. “That really annoyed me because quite a few of the Philadelphia dancers on ‘Bandstand’ died of AIDS,” Smith said.
While “Bandstand” fans across the country imagined a true romantic relationship between Sullivan, who secretly liked girls, and her on-screen companion, Rossi, who was straight, she says it was little more than madefor-TV “puppy love.” “We were the first reality show,” she adds.
Like Smith, she believes that if her true sexual preference and that of others on the show had become public in the days before Stonewall and today’s LGBT power, “Bandstand” would have been taken off the air.
“Parents across America would never, NEVER have allowed their kids to put ‘Bandstand’ on,” she writes.
Sullivan and the other dancers often congregated in Rittenhouse Square, the historic epicenter of what is known as the City of Brotherly Love’s “Gayborhood.” There even was chatter and fear that Clark, who died at 82 in 2012, sent members of his production staff to spy on them and report back the names of the suspected gay regulars.
“In other parts of the country, if you were a gay kid growing up, you were probably the only one in town who was gay,” Sullivan said. “But . . . we were like a little family together, and we all had something in common, and we all stuck together, and that made it easier for us.”
But it was not easy on the mean streets of Philadelphia to be a “Bandstand” regular suspected of being gay. In fact, it was dangerous.
As Sullivan puts it: “The boys danced. They weren’t playing football. They weren’t playing basketball. They weren’t playing baseball — they were DANCING. And then they leave the show, go up on the El, go home to their neighborhoods, they then had to run to their door because somebody was always waiting there to beat them up.”
The bashing of “Bandstand” regulars, gay and straight, happened all the time, Sullivan and Smith reveal.
Today, Arlene Sullivan lives with a partner and despite having suffered strokes, still loves to dance. Once a week, she goes to a hop thrown by another “Bandstand” original, 76-year-old Philadelphia radio and TV personality Jerry Blavat, who bills himself as “The Geator with the Heater” and “The Boss with the Hot Sauce.”
“It’s my one night out,” Sullivan says.