On and on, and on and on; my cipher keeps movin' like a rollin' stone
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Part of the appeal of the male star—whether it was James Dean or Elvis Presley or Paul McCartney—was that you would _never_ marry him; the romance would never end in the tedium of marriage. Many girls expressed their adulation in conventional, monogamous terms, for example, picking their favorite Beatle and writing him a serious letter of proposal, or carrying placards saying, ‘John, Divorce Cynthia.’ But it was inconceivable that any fan would actually marry a Beatle or sleep with him (sexually active ‘groupies’ were still a few years off) or even hold his hand. Adulation of the male star was a way to express sexual yearnings that would normally be pressed into the service of popularity or simply repressed. The star could be loved noninstrumentally, for his own sake, and with complete abandon. Publicly to advertise this hopeless love was to protest the calculated, pragmatic sexual repression of teenage life.
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, “Beatlemania: A sexually defiant consumer subculture?” 1992, rpt. inThe Subcultures Reader, ed. Ken Gelder and Sarah Thornton (London: Routledge 1997), 532.
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