The latest wave of teenyboppers are swimming on both ends of the pool.

Five torturously available actor/model/waiter types hang around the kind of abandoned park you might see in a news segment about runaway youth or public sex. It's obvious from the way these pouty boy-men are dressed that they're not here to play basketball. Rain falls and a celebration begins--shirts open; hairless, pumped-up chests and washboard stomachs gyrate in tantalizing close-up. Just when you expect an orgy to break out, an ID appears on the screen. It's the Backstreet Boys' hit video "Quit Playing Games (With My Heart)."

The Florida-based singing/dancing group is the first teen-targeted act to score in the wake of Hanson and the Spice Girls' American breakthrough, but in Europe and Asia, they are just one multimillion-selling star act among a dizzying constellation of boy-bands boasting countless screaming admirers, the likes of which we haven't seen since the glory days of New Kids on the Block. However, unlike the lovably dorky NKOTB dudes, the new wave of pop boys look more like what one might find in a Details fashion shoot, or the latest Jeff Stryker hardcore flesh extravaganza. The latent teen-dream element is now blatant. Harmony pop has gone homo.

Once again the Brits can take credit for pushing the lavender pop envelope. The current boy-band explosion has its roots in the early '90s success of Take That, the quintet that conquered the globe while America was knee-deep in grunge. The group's early hits were produced by Ian Levine, former DJ of Heaven, London's largest gay club. Levine also masterminded the archetypal '80s Brit boy-band, Seventh Avenue, an ever-changing pack of pseudo-"rent boys" (Anglo slang for hustlers) who adorned highly homoerotic 12-inch record-sleeve photos set at the beach or gym.

The difference between Seventh Avenue and the Backstreet Boys--or Boyzone, East 17, 'N Sync, Caught in the Act, Bed & Breakfast, 2Be3, 911, etc.--is marketing. While Seventh Avenue was intended as a pretty British answer to America's butch Village People, the current boy-bands are not only targeted at men with a taste for pop and soft quasi-porn but at girls feeling the first pangs of desire. Anybody who's ever been to an Erasure concert knows the special affinity between gay male adults and female teens: They both appreciate a toe-tappin' tune celebrating love, loss, and codependency, and their combined buying power builds pop empires. Bananarama, Dead or Alive, Rick Astley--'80s Brit dance stars overseen by the Stock-Aitken-Waterman hit factory--dominated the pop charts and the gay disco, and they're the model for today's teenybop Svengalis.

The fact that most of these bands appear queer doesn't hamper the teen (or, let's face it, preteen) female imagination: The boys' clean, preened, and not-so-mean nature only makes them safer for girls who aren't yet ready for a real-life dude who might bust a move. Managers, record companies, and T-shirt manufacturers have a vested interest in maintaining the party line that these girly-blokes are straight, and therefore obtainable for any fantasy (some even resemble boyish, new-school lesbians). But their handlers are becoming less bashful. At the height of East 17's popularity in 1995, manager Tom Watkins told European MTV that the look of his act was "rough trade"--slang for a straight tough who lets gay fellows do him for cash or kicks. Recently, the hilariously named Caught in the Act--the half-Dutch, half-British quartet massive in Germany--came out of the closet as three-quarters queer.

The current duality reaches its absurd apogee in Boyzone's video, "Mystical Experience." Images of the Irish teens appear on the wide-screen TV of a young hunk in a posh apartment. Whether or not you recognize the stubbly viewer in question as Enrique "Son of Julio" Iglesias, who first sang "Experiencia Religiosa," is irrelevant. His charmed grin, rapt gaze, and phone call at the end of the video to Boyzone's office suggests not mere approval but total infatuation.

Do boy-bands get fan mail from male admirers? Nick, the Backstreet Boys' 17-year-old blond heartthrob, had this to say:

"Hooo! Um, I don't think so too much, um, ah, maybe a few here and there, but, um, hey, I don't know--yeah, we do, basically, sometimes."

Copyright © SPIN: new music and youth culture.