Thus begins the Hardy Boys classic, The Mystery of Dream Focus. Apparently there are those who think that there is a subtext of "homoerotic desire" buried in those harmless pages. And they've even gone so far as to publish books about it! Well, [[User:Dream Focus]] is having none of it!


If you enjoy the discussion on the article's talk page, you'll really enjoy his userpage essay on the issue:

And, Will Beback will show up in the discussion in 5...4...3...

Incidentally, what about the Boys' surname? There are no accidents.

My clue's kind of pointing this way.

Putting aside the issue of whether or not Dream Focus (T-C-L-K-R-D) is a homophobe of some kind, it seems likely that his opponent in this dispute, Ricardiana (T-C-L-K-R-D) , is a lesbian - based on the contents of her (?) user page.

Oh, the irony!

In this edit, Ricardiana ups the ante by linking the word "whiteness" to the article on White privilege (T-H-L-K-D), effectively accusing the Hardy Boys of racism as well as homosexuality.

So much for Wikipedia being a good source of information on pop culture, eh? (There's also a bit of subtle speculation about the users involved, implied by this edit...)

Once again Wikipedia seems to degenerate into the opposite an encyclopedia, which ought to provide article coverage based on an informed consensus of the discipline relevant to the topic. Instead Wikipedia needs to be a battlefield of contending odd and quirky views about all things large and small. Some of this is simple lack of restraint. The "editors" don't know when to quit and eventually provide too much detail and too many sub-parts to permit a generally accepted view to prevail. Some of it is the vanity of nerds who have to show off their special insights and knowledge. The result is decidedly anti-encyclopedic.

A true encyclopedia would produce an article with no mention at all of the "gayness" or "racism" of the Hardy Boys.

What? You haven't seen the Frank/Joe 'zines?

Quite an appropriate picture if we're pushing the homoerotic angle.

The Hardy Boys are brothers -- so you are suggesting they are both gay and incestuous?



You know, the whole "homosocial" aspect section of that article is f**king idiotic. These are mystery stories for kids, not a David Shankbone wet dream. No serious encyclopedia editor would ever allow such tripe into print. No wonder people laugh out loud at Wikipedia.

Wonderful---now Ricardiana's managed to attract two conservative dramah-whores,
Noroton and Ottava, to the talk page. (Perhaps because they saw this thread?)

In any case, sit back and , as the "encyclopedia" enjoys further debasement.

And me ... but if you are going to call me a whore, you are going to have to pay for the privilege.

Yes, just like all pairs of straight brothers and sisters are incestuous...

Wow. And I thought I was wasting time with Ayn Rand.

When you could be reading Wikipedia Review instead? Surely you jest, sir.

Hey, I spent a great deal of time trying to get rid of some crankish academic's theory that a particular painting shows a homoerotic attraction between a pair of boys because one of them is holding an apple. I never succeeded, of course. The irony is that the painting in question appeared out of nowhere at the end of WWII and probably isn't by the attributed artist, and I would guess isn't old either. You can find an academic citation for almost any stupid erotic theory about literature or art; what you can't find is all the people reading the journal in their offices and rolling their eyes.

Diffs, please?

A lead for an entry on The Hardy Boys with a sentence that reads something like



and with something in the body explaining it is excellent. There's a degree of ignorance involved in reducing that to "LOL [or GRR] WP is making the Hardy Boys gay for each other."

The line that WP is good on popular culture is something of a canard. There will be an article and if you come in search of some particular fact you will probably find it. But the people writing these articles are generally not scouring LexisNexis, JSTOR and the Reference section of a good library.

If you do and you are lucky, you will find a small number of scholars holding forth, sometimes pretentiously, sometimes with tenuous insights, and sometimes making embarrassing errors on matters of fact (in a rather similar way to media stories on specialist topics, as we've discussed many times here). But none of these are reasons for leaving their commentaries out; nor is feeling uncomfortable with fags claiming ownership of your fond childhood memories. Ricardiana seems a good editor who alas has not been driven off WP in despair quickly enough, and is now probably addicted to the crack of providing competent articles to a large readership where dross might otherwise prevail.



This is all good stuff to have, just as the stuff about teh gayz is.

Yep. I'm still traumatized by this kind of thing:

I quoted you in my Talk page response to Ricardia:

" As a clever fellow once said, "You can find an academic citation for almost any stupid erotic theory about literature or art; what you can't find is all the people reading the journal in their offices and rolling their eyes."

Needless to say, a certain judgment is required in these matters, and all the references in the world to Wikipedia Policy can't alter that fact, for there are always some sources that are not included. There's a reason that, say, Encyclopedia Britannica, wouldn't include a bunch of cretinous drivel derived from some erstwhile academic's musing about having achieved erections past while reading childrens' stories, for crying out loud. I suppose some of the people who perused Clifford the Big Red Dog stories went on to desire to engage in sexual congress with livestock, but that doesn't tell us so much about Clifford, as it does about them. And that is the underlying basis for my remarks here ie., the fact that Mr. Michael Bronski of the Boston Phoenix claims to have written an article about The Hardy Boys does not, in point of fact, make that true. That article is not about The Hardy Boys. That article is about Michael Bronski. Most leftoid, identity politics-derived literary criticism comes under the same heading ie., the author is merely discoursing on themselves. If someone wants to write an article about Michael Bronski, that Boston Phoenix piece you cited would constitute an excellent source. But as a source for an article on the The Hardy Boys, it fails miserably. KevinOKeeffe (talk) 19:40, 30 July 2009 (UTC)"

I was just having this very argument with Cla68, which I'll move here instead, since the thread premise above is so outrageous (yet verifiable in the Wiki sense) that it illustrates my point even better.

If you get four stories from your sources on a subject you know nothing about, there's not much you can do but organize them and cite them in an article and shrugg.


Why you'd be writing such an article in the first place on something you know nothing of, is not very clear. But perhaps you're a gnome, in there fixing spelling and gramatical errors, getting stuff properly organized with good headings, a descriptive lead, and other writing and copywriting stuff. If so, trying to follow NPOV and NOR is a good idea.

But the point is that we expect more than that of encyclopedias, and if WP truely GOT no more than that, it would be a truly crappy place and have no even a hint of any well-written article at all. A Martian or a nerd who'd been born in library and never left it, could have done as well at assembling citations to real-life events. No actual life experience needed.

Did the Hardy boys' author intend a subtext that the bothers Hardy were queer for each other? If you've read a few of the books, what does YOUR life-experience as a human being living on planet Earth (gay or not) TELL you? You don't need to be an academic Hardy boys scholar.

For much this same sort of reason, we expect more from juries and from judges. Cool Hand/One and I have argued about this, but if we didn't expect juries to rely on their own private fund of knowledge and experience, we wouldn't pay attention to jury selection. We'd just continue to have the 12 Irish-male jury judge the case where the cop arrests the black profession trying to get into his own house. No, wait, let's have 12 black guys who've been pulled over by white cops do the job....

This is also the Sotomayor problem.

In Cla68's world, you've going to have to accept the statement of the husband that his wife fell with the butcher knife, jammed it into her sternum, then pulled it out, got up, slipped in her own blood, and fell and jammed it into her chest again. Bummer of an acccident, there, spouse. The medical examiner can only say it could conceivably have happened that. But he wasn't there, and in any case all he has is his own opinion. There's no way to decide the truth, so all we can do is reference the stories properly, because the jury are officially missing from Wikipedia, according to its own pillars, so every case has no conclusion. There isn't even a single judge, but a panel of them who have to have a public foodfight on the bench every time there's a motion to include, or exclude, evidence. What respect for the court THAT generates.

The same for the Hardy boys. Put it all down without comment and let the reader decide.

You missed out one important part -- on Wikipedia you have no idea who the judge and jury are, or whether there are in fact only 2 jurors each of whom has voted 6 times, with a 12-year-old judge, and a medical examiner with a super-secret infallible method which he won't tell you about.

Well, I've decided to go after this one. Who the heck is this Dennis guy, anyway? (other than, I suspect, things I can't say in the clear)

Do not zombify necrothreads, lest ye be accused of being a resurrectionist, and not the good kind, either.

Burke and Hare

So the Hardys were teh gay for each other? Well hell, my childhood is ruined now.

The salon.com article in the refs was an interesting read though, never knew the original "Dixon" was a Canuck who only got $100 a book for all that.