This chat idea came directly from the comments of our Timothee Chalamet post from the other day, in which people reminisced a bit about their own teen crushes and the faces that we hung in our bedrooms. I remember being about 11 and reading Judy Blume’s Just As Long As We’re Together, in which there’s a central bit about how the main character Stephanie hangs a photo of a young Richard Gere on her ceiling above the bed, but she pretends he’s her boyfriend and rechristens him Benjamin Moore — yes, after the paint company — because she thinks it’s a hotter name. (The first line of that book, in fact, is the mom saying, “Stephanie is into hunks.” I LOVED that book.) I didn’t have a Richard Gere equivalent. Now, if you’d handed me a poster of Stefan Edberg, Hot Swedish Tennis God, then it would have been in a place of great honor forever. Tennis players were extremely my jam. Instead, all I hung up as a high-schooler: a large Monet water lillies poster, a medium London tube map, and then a small Tate Gallery poster of part of the tube map being squeezed out of tubes of oil paint. The only celebrities that ever graced my walls were the ones I ripped out of Smash Hits magazine in England, when I was, oh, probably anywhere between 7 and 10, and even then — other than George Michael, OBVIOUSLY, my one true love — I just did it because they were free. Hence, Limahl. And Go West. Some Bros, maybe? (My sister was much cooler and had a lot of Madonna circa “Like a Virgin.”)
Who was YOUR Benjamin “Richard Gere” Moore?
