White Boys of The Month, or There and Back Again

An homage to every boy I’ve loved before (from 2008-2012)

By Kylie Heider

We know them, we love them, we want them. They are dark-haired and blue-eyed, pale and skinny. We see them in movies and on Instagram. We wait outside their nondescript, rumored locations for them to get out of dark Cadillacs, hoping to get a picture. They sulk on the covers of magazines in designer clothes, and we can look into their eyes and somehow they look back at us. They are Timothée Chalamet, they are Tom Holland. They are men of the moment. But how did we get to this coalescence of teenage lust? Who are the fallen heroes who came before them, the brothers in arms who paved the way for their reign? 

To answer this, we can look to the past. We owe our new it-boys to the heartthrobs of yesteryear, to the Logan Lermans and the Josh Hutchersons. Could any of these new white boys (Pete Davidson, for example) ever match the butterflies that Percy Jackson, sitting on the bottom of a pool, gave you when you were 11? I don’t think so. Could Noah Centineo’s cocky swagger ever live up to the noble suave of Orlando Bloom in “Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest?” The answer is no. Let us not forget those white boys who came before our White Boy of The Month. To our onscreen crushes of the 2000s and early 2010s, to the harbingers of our confusing adolescent sexualities, I have not forgotten you. So here’s to you, for bringing about this new era of skinny replacements which we find shameless joy lusting after. Thank you.