I Stanned Him First
How My Love of Devon Sawa Marked Peak Teen Mag Culture
As an adolescent growing up in the ’90s, I found the idea of grocery shopping the sexiest of mundane errands thanks to the peewee football comedy Little Giants.
In a key scene in the film, Becky “The Icebox” O’Shea (Shawna Waldron) is strolling down a grocery aisle, eating a box of powdered donuts, when she makes a startling discovery: QB prospect Junior Floyd (Devon Sawa) effortlessly throwing toilet paper rolls into a shopping cart. He bites his lip. He tosses. He doesn’t miss.
While Turner Classic Movies probably won’t ever do a retrospective on this film or the feature-film debut of plucky Canadian actor Devon Sawa, I will, because it was also the cinematic debut my sexuality, which came slinking out from behind the curtain like Jessica Rabbit’s legs.
As a kid, the Little Giants grocery store scene was filthy for me. When I first watched this moment on the VHS copy I got in my Easter basket, something had come, indeed, on Easter Sunday, and it wasn’t Jesus. When Junior turns to look Becky in the eye, between the cracks of the grocery store shelves, a strand of hair fallen across his perfect effing face, no amount of automatic veggie mists could extinguish this newfound desire in me. It was like time stopped, waiting with bated breath for me to catch up. And then Junior Floyd introduces himself with the confidence of a grown man, giving a cool handshake to Hanon, Zolteck, and Tad with his between-a-boy-and-a-bro timbre. What was this feeling and why did I suddenly need to hit the rewind button over and over again?
Claiming ownership to an unknown actor, as a teen, makes you feel like you’re in on a secret, like he’s yours, before all the girls would go on to discover Sawa in the movies Casper and Now and Then (in which he got to mack on Christina Ricci in both films — lucky bitch). After Little Giants, I had to follow everything he did, including a Disney Adventures spread I begged my mother and friends to track down for me when he, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and Scott Bairstow were on the cover promoting Wild America.
Soon after, I graduated from Disney Adventures and traded up (or down, depending on how you look at it, since the paper quality was worse) for Teen Beat and BOP!, which often featured Sawa, JTT, Rider Strong, and other ’90s heartthrobs in all their pictorial glory, spreads that went over the full two pages and looked airbrushed to infinity. I was a wallflower at this time, voted by my teacher as “Most Likely To Be a Librarian,” and this was the closest I would get to talking to a boy (even if I’m proud to say I didn’t talk to these images I had taped up on my walls). Because I grew up during a time when Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt were engaged, donning the same cute pixie haircut, I for some reason had a grown-out version of Junior Floyd’s haircut at some point, assuming that the way to a man’s heart was through his stylish coif.
Of all the Devon Sawa characters of the ’90s, Junior Floyd was my favorite, so quintessentially of the decade with his parted-down-the-middle hair and flannel. Seeing him today invokes the need to pop open a Snapple. Devon Sawa and this character are a specific ’90s moment, frozen in time, as Disney Adventures, Teen Beat, and BOP! magazines are all long extinct (2007, 2007, and 2014 respectively). While magazines like Tiger Beat still exist, teens today have more direct access to their favorite heartthrobs through social media. In many ways, Sawa depicting a deranged fan who contacted Eminem through letters in the “Stan” video marked a pivotal touchstone in pop culture. There was still a veil between fans and celebrities in 2000. Just 10 years later, Stan would presumably be tweeting his threats and vitriol at Eminem. That Devon Sawa stands in for peak idol culture is not lost on me.
As a prepubescent, the best way to explore your budding sexuality was through pre-teen magazines. Sure, they didn’t offer intimidating tutorials about sex and puberty like Seventeen, but they made it OK to look at boys or girls without having your mother chide you with, “Someone has a crush!” It was personal and harmless because the magazine was a collage of celebrity actors you’d never meet or might have to talk to in between classes at some point. Looking at Devon Sawa through those spreads was a safe space before I’d have to address dating and sex in the years to come.
Thankfully, I don’t watch the grocery scene in Little Giants with the same sexual attraction as I did as a kid (otherwise, I might be writing this from prison), but when it comes to pinpointing the exact moment I discovered both my sexuality and love of Devon Sawa, I can pop in my old Little Giants VHS tape and fast-forward straight to that scene. It was a defining moment in my adolescence, and as it would later turn out, an important one for introducing the ultimate obsessed fan, which as it turned out, wasn’t even me.
