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□ Name: David Posner
□ Journal: smallgayjew
□ Series: The History Boys
□ Canon point: toward the end of the film, after Hector’s memorial, before he goes to Oxford
□ History: (I have filled in the very minimal amount of history we get in the film with some bits from the play, so far as they don’t contradict film canon)

Posner is from a lower middle class family in Sheffield, and he attends Cutlers’ Grammar School. His parents are older, and his father is a retired furrier. He’s an only child and lives with his parents and his uncle.

Growing up, Posner was sort of doted on by his parents, mostly because he’s an only child who was born late in their life when they’d pretty much given up hope of having children. Most of his childhood was spent at home, mostly because his mother worried about him. When he started at Cutlers at age 11, he became a bit more socialized, easily making friends with the other boys, though this only lasted until they went through puberty and he, well, didn’t. After this, he wasn’t really close to any of them except Scripps, who was his best friend basically because he didn’t treat Posner as though he were only tolerating him. With everyone else, he felt like he was included by default rather than because they really liked him.

Posner is Jewish, and though he appears to be fairly lax about it, he does get in trouble at home over a conversation he has in a class about the Holocaust and afterward his father writes an angry letter to Posner’s headmaster about the conversation, which includes a demand that Posner stops being asked to sing hymns in school, though Posner actually enjoys this. Religion is an important part of his parents’ life, but for Posner, Judaism is more a cultural connection. His schooling has pulled him away from faith, and he isn’t actually sure he believes in God. This is largely due to the fact that he’s been different for most of his life, and that has made him want to distance himself from the things that make him different. He can’t stop being Jewish, but he can at least pull away from the parts that are by choice.

It isn’t until his last year at Cutlers that he realizes he’s gay. He’d always sort of assumed that the reason he was never interested in girls was that he was behind the rest of the boys developmentally. Even after he develops a crush on Dakin, he ascribes it to envy. Dakin is charming and good looking and talented, which is what Posner would like to be. Most of the other boys know he’s gay before he makes the connection himself. He’s hesitant to accept this about himself primarily because for most of his life the only gay person he knows is his teacher Hector, an overweight, married man who routinely gropes the other boys while giving them rides home on his motorbike. Posner sees how the others talk about Hector behind his back—regardless of how well-liked he is and how respectful they are in class—and he doesn’t want the same treatment. It isn’t until another gay teacher who is slightly less pathetic in Posner’s eyes shows up that he is actually willing to accept his homosexuality. He isn’t exactly surprised by this acceptance, more resigned to the idea that he will never be happy in his romantic life.

Because the film only covers the last term of his time at Cutlers, there’s very little actual background for him. He’s a very good student, having received 3 A-Levels and being among eight boys at Cutlers who stay on for an extra term to study for the entrance exams to Oxford and Cambridge. He ends up not only receiving a place at his chosen college at Oxford but also receiving a scholarship.

He’s musical, often singing for his classmates or teachers, and dramatic, periodically acting out scenes from old films in front of class.

Just after he and his classmates receive their acceptance letters from Oxbridge, two of his teachers are involved in a motorcycle accident, and one of them is killed. We don’t get to see much of his reaction to this, but he does sing a solo with the other boys at the teacher’s memorial service.

□ Personality:
Posner is, in his own words, small, Jewish, and homosexual. (Also, living in Sheffield, and therefore, fucked.) He’s spent the last year studying for the entrance examination to Oxford. He’s also just realized he’s gay and is trying to come to terms with that. He’s had a crush on one of his classmates for years, and though he knows nothing will ever come of it, he still pines after him. He’s pessimistic about his sexuality, certain he’ll never have a fulfilling life as a homosexual. He also thinks that it’s very possible that this is only a phase, though he isn’t certain he wants it to be. (This comes out both in the conversation he has where he comes out to one of his teachers and in several conversations he has with Scripps.)

Posner is the youngest boy in his class, and he takes the constant teasing about just hitting puberty with grace and wit for the most part, though his reactions seem to indicate that he feels himself an oustider. He enjoys his teacher Hector’s classes for their silliness, and is not opposed to getting up in front of the others and serenading them with old musical standards or acting out love scenes from classic movies. He’s open about his affections for Dakin, one of the other boys, but he doesn’t equate this with being homosexual until his last term. He’s friendly to his classmates, though reserved. He has a very dry sense of humor and only smiles rarely, though he often seems to be enjoying himself.

He started noticing the other boys before he accepted his homosexuality, but he just sort of wrote it off to something else that he sat back and watched rather than participating in. After he comes out to his teacher, he chalks his homosexuality up to one more thing that makes him different, and since most of the other boys knew already, he doesn’t feel the need to try and hide it. He even briefly tries to accept it openly, serenading Dakin in the middle of class. It’s easier for him to admit it because he knows that they feel rather protective of him, and he’s attempting to act as though he doesn’t care about the way they tease him. (Interestingly, the other boys don’t tease him about being gay, though they do tease him about being Jewish.)

For the most part, he wants people to like him, and he only grumbles a little when he is teased about various things. But he does have a backbone, as when he stands up to his crush during a class discussion about the Holocaust. (Significant because Pos looks up to Dakin so far as to deliberately mimic his handwriting.)

In class, Pos is a bit of a suck-up. He likes that teachers like him, and while the other boys often try to get under the teachers’ skin, frustrate them or draw them into logical puzzles in order to back them into a corner and prove their superior intellect, Posner is much more likely to be the one to point out that the others are full of crap and to take the teacher’s side, or to pipe in with the fact that he works in a bookshop when the headmaster exhorts the boys to do something ‘fitting’ for their employment. This likely stems from the relationship he has with his parents, which is both respectful and a bit protective. He wants them to be happy and feels pressure to do so because he’s their only child. Part of living up to what he sees as their expectations of him includes being the best student possible. Another reason for the way he treats his teachers is his desire to be seen as normal. He wants people to like him, all people, especially people in positions of authority. He thinks this will make his life easier on the one hand, and on the other hand, he simply wants to leave a positive impression on everyone he meets. He has a really rather tragic conversation with Hector in which he admits to feeling ‘out of the swim,’ or separated from the world around him.

He genuinely cares about people, and has a hard time seeing them in pain without doing something, as when his teacher breaks down in tears in front of the class, and Posner is the only one who goes to comfort him.

He is also quite ambitions and really, really wants to go to Oxford. Enough that, for his entrance exam, he wrote an essay about Hitler in which he referred to him as a much misunderstood man, following the advice of one of his teachers that he could get away with a lot more in terms of presenting the situation in a somewhat different light specifically because he was Jewish.

He’s prone to melancholy—and depression, later in life—and he has a very pessimistic view of what his life will look like in the future. More than anything he wants to be normal, but he knows that he isn’t and he can’t change the things that make him abnormal.

For nearly his whole life, Posner has been different. When he was younger, being Jewish was the thing that made him somewhat odd. Once the other boys in his class started going through puberty, he felt left behind there as well. It’s this feeling of separation that makes him want to suppress the things about himself that make him different.

□ Age: 18
□ Gender: male
□ Appearance: He’s short (around 5’7”) and slight and pale with dark blonde hair and blue eyes, not exceedingly handsome but not bad looking. He definitely looks younger than 18. Roughly like so: http://showbizgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Screen-Shot-2013-09-08-at-23.13.38.png
□ Abilities/Powers: Nothing supernatural, but he is both very clever and musically and dramatically talented. And he speaks French
□ Personal Items:
- one picture, no frame: http://www.moviemail.com/images/large/19337_History-Boys-2.JPG
- a used copy of Tudor Economic Documents
- a well-read anthology of British poetry
- a biography of W.H. Auden
- one set of scholars robes: http://www.walters-oxford.co.uk/oxford-university-under-graduate-and-post-graduate-gowns/scholars-exhibitioner
- one school uniform

□ First Person Sample:
http://konran.dreamwidth.org/3259.html
□ Third Person Sample:
http://betenoire-logs.dreamwidth.org/860789.html