The news of Luke Perry’s death feels to me like a cruel time warp. One, he was just 52 years old—too young to die. And, at the same time, how could he have even been 52? Wasn’t it only yesterday that he was a fictional (and dubiously mature) 17-year-old Dylan McKay, baja-clad and brooding, making out with “Bren” at the Beach Club on Beverly Hills, 90210? Like so many tweens and teens and women of the 90s, Perry’s death has taken me back. Back to the sweet time in my life when I was hopelessly in love with him.
Dylan—the character that spawned a million baby Dylans—contained multitudes. He was just a teenager but bore the emotional scars of a grizzled man twice his age (indeed Perry was 24 when the show first aired in 1990). When some teens were just beginning to take their first sips of beer, Dylan was already struggling with alcoholism. With his free-spirited mother, Iris (Stephanie Beacham), being crunchy in Hawaii and his dad, Jack (Josh Taylor), in prison, he was an ostensible orphan who functioned, basically, as an emancipated adult, allowed to live alone in a beachy sex den with his very own answering machine (outgoing message: “Hey, this is Dylan; you know the drill.”).
Did this freedom from curfews and adult supervision entirely make sense? Not really. But did we care? Definitely not. Because Dylan was a beautiful, tortured soul, the classic rebel with a heart of gold. If Brenda (Shannen Doherty, of course) was the everygirl, we saw him through her eyes. His pain, to our knowledge, was nothing a little Walsh family love, or a furtive kiss, couldn’t begin to fix. It may have bred in some of us an attraction to the broken “bad boy.” But Dylan wasn’t so one-dimensional—he was exciting and edgy, but he could also be goofy, tender, and kind.
It’s surely a bit unfair to the man himself, the real person his family and friends knew, but where Perry ends and Dylan begins in my heart is hard to say; both were essential parts of my girlhood, like so many of my peers. When 90210 debuted, I was only 8 and decidedly not allowed to watch most episodes (unless my parents were feeling charitable), both because it aired at my bedtime (9:00 p.m.) and because I was too young for episodes like “Spring Dance”—the one where Brenda and Kelly (Jennie Garth) show up in the same black-and-white off-the-shoulder dress, and also Brenda and Dylan have sex in a hotel room that he rented for the occasion. As you may be able to infer, I watched it anyway, both by sneakily switching it on in the clunky little TV in my bedroom on the lowest possible volume and via secret VHS recordings orchestrated by my best friend, Diane, who lived across the street and shared in my Dylan worship. Some people, somewhere, must have been Team Brandon, but no one we cared to know. To us, it was only Dylan—he who was smoldering in his signature bajas and even in jean tuxedos. Then there was the way he nuzzled Brenda’s neck in the opening credits, and the way he took off his motorcycle helmet and gazed presciently at the camera, making our hearts ache.
Nostalgia for Luke Perry is also nostalgia for this time—the same Hulu’s Pen15 is tapping into—when we hung posters of Perry or Devon Sawa on our walls and taped their shows on TV. Despite having reservations about the show itself, my parents didn’t try to stop me from loving Perry or McKay; that would have been nearly impossible. 90210 was too great a pop-cultural force to ignore. I was allowed the life-size door poster of Luke in head-to-toe black awkwardly pointing toward my bed and the satin, heart-shaped pillow bearing his face on a palm-tree print, both probably from Spencer’s. Almost 30 years later, I can still remember the silky feel of it on on my cheek.
As the show went on to become a global phenomenon that aired for a decade on Fox, Luke Perry—one of the people who always seems to be known by his full name—became the imaginary boyfriend of millions of women and girls around the world. And, not insignificantly, he awakened something in us. Perry was our first big celebrity crush (or frequently tied with one of the New Kids on the Block; in my case, Donnie); our first tingle of longing. I wanted, desperately, to grow up as soon as possible and be a glamorous, sun-kissed California teen like the 90210 teens were (a delusional goal for a Long Island child). Those of us who feel devastated by his death—even if we hadn’t kept up with him or watched Riverdale in later years—fell for him when we were shaping our own ideas about romantic relationships. His narrowed eyes, his raspy voice, his perfect pompadour, that scar through his right eyebrow (a casualty of running into a soda machine at a bowling alley as a kid, apparently), his lean surfer body beaming into our TVs every week gave us an early taste of romance and despair, of the seemingly shattering drama of grown-up love.
The photos of Perry from that era, like smelling the perfume I wore in high school, make me feel that longing even now. My adoration for him was so strong, it endured even after he moved on to Kelly (raise your hand if Sophie B. Hawkins’s “Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover” will forever remind you of Dylan and Kelly’s illicit cabana make-out sessions while Brenda was studying abroad). And that feeling resurges today with the news that he’s gone. Perry imprinted on our hearts in the way that people who you love when you’re young do. I’m 37 now, and I can watch whatever shows I want, but Luke Perry’s loss makes me want to go back to the Thursday nights when his face would flicker on my screen at low volume so I couldn’t be caught watching this saucy, grown-up show; to hugging my heart-shaped pillow and gazing up at his poster on my wall.