John & CC Have New Hats

As one of my pals professed: "I really like your blog, but I like the stuff about you... not the birthdays of dead gay people". I started to collect vintage (1860-1980) photographs of men together a decade ago. I have more than 100. I was sharing them with readers of Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, but I began to wander away to other subjects along the way.

I borrowed against my IRA to catch up on the bills & repairs. It has been an interesting experience to usually not have any cash for some fun. I long ago decided that a perfect day included going to a part town with which I am not familiar, some bucks in my jeans & no agenda. I earmarked a tiny portion of the cash flow to just such a plan. I took the Husband with me because... well, I sort of had to.

The Husband found some swell stuff to use in projects for his BOYS' FORT, & I found this photo, at the best salvage store that I have encountered: Old Portland Hardware & Architectural.

I find this photo to be one of the very finest I have added to the collection. It is certainly the sweetest of a sweet selection of snapshots & formal portraits of men in couples or groups from the past 150 years.

The names are written in pencil: John Fuller & CC Brown. The rest of the piece is a perfect embossed paper in a Victorian pattern. I love these 2 gentlemen. What is their story that led to this portrait?

Would you like to see more of the collection?

Born On This Day- February 18th... Photographer Duane Michals

"I'm politically against Same Sex Marriage. I want civil unions. I want all the political advantages, but marriage is a tired vestige of the heterosexual world. I don't know why gay people would want to get married. Of all things! It's a failed institution. It just doesn't make sense. Wedding cake? Oh please!"

Duane Michals' photography gives me an Art-On. Very much a favorite at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia, Duane Michals is not just an amazing photographer, he is truly an original. We have a coffee table book of his photographs which I will get out & peruse, because today is his birthday. This will make for a lovely evening with a glass of whiskey. Michals also produced the art for The Police album Synchronicity in 1983, so that album can be the soundtrack for my viewing pleasure.

Michals became a photographer as a matter of need. All his best impulses grew out of the need to express something from the intangible. Largely self-taught, his work is noted for its innovation & artistry. His work is well known for its insistent, & often humorous, use of the narrative series. Many of his pieces works actually incorporate handwritten text right onto the images. Michals has a fascination with making tangible the intangible realm of love, death, dreams, & wishes. His works deal with human sexuality, both straight & gay, but always in a dreamy, droll, divine & rather decorous manner.

Michals: “The keyword is having something to express. When you look at my photographs you are looking into my mind.”

Michals: "I am not bothered by those pesky questions dealt with by most photographers- how can I get this model to smile without showing her teeth? Does this house look better with or without the little red wagon in front? So think hard, think deep & ask new questions. As a photographer, how can you present the nature of existence & the drama of the human condition? How will you define beauty & ugliness in visual terms? What is death & why is mankind fixated on rational explanations of the afterlife."

"When people ask me what I am, I tell them I'm the artist formally known as a photographer, I am an expressionist & by that I mean I'm not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs."

Michals grew up in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. In 1953 he received a BA from the University of Denver. In 1956 he went on to study design at the Parsons School of Design with a plan to becoming a graphic designer. He did not complete his studies

In 1958 while on a trip in the USSR, he discovered his interest in photography. The photographs he made during this trip became his first exhibition held in 1963 at the Underground Gallery in NYC. Michals settled in the city in the late 1950s & became known as a commercial & fashion photographer, working for Esquire & Mademoiselle, & he covered the filming of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Great Gatsby (1974) for Vogue. He worked for Dance Magazine & After Dark. In 1968 Michals was hired by the government of Mexico to photograph the 1968 Olympic Games. In 1970 his works were shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC.

He does not have a studio. Instead, he takes photographs of people in their environment, which was a contrast to the method of other photographers of his time, Richard Avedon & Irving Penn.

Michals has been in a relationship with his partner, an architect he met at the gym, for 51 years. Though he has not been involved in gay civil rights, his photography has regularly addressed gay themes & quietly added to the pantheon of 20th century gay imagery.

Born On This Day- January 14th... Photographer Cecil Beaton

I have been reading 2 volumes of Cecil Beaton’s Diaries over the past year, in small little doses, choosing to read a few entries here & there. He knew & photographed everyone that mattered for most of the 20th century. As a gay man of his time, & a dandy like Quinton Crisp, he had to re-invent himself & discover a way to survive & thrive. I know that I have always been grateful to be a gay man because it meant that I was an outsider & not a straight, white, WASP male, but how much harder that must have been earlier in the century, when homosexuality was illegal.
 

 
Born in 1904 in London & coming of age at the peak of the 20s, Cecil Beaton was in love with the worlds of high society, theater, & glamour. Beauty, in his hands, was transformed into elegance, fantasy, romance & charm. His inspired artistic eye led to a following among fashionable society & eventually a full fledged career as the foremost fashion & portrait photographer of his day. He was so attuned to the changes of fashion that his career maintained its momentum for 5 decades; from the Bloomsbury crowd to the Rolling Stones. Beaton died in 1980.

Cecil Beaton will always be remembered for his huge influence on the world of photography & fashion. His incredible work personified elegance & grace, but his personal behavior was at times, anything but. He was not known to be a loyal friend, a humble talent or a genuine soul of any sort. In fact, his persona & image was fabricated to gain him access to the world that had always just beyond his reach. But, everybody loved Cecil, the photographer. He worked for Vogue for more that 30 years. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who worked for Harper’s Bazaar: "He was such a naughty man. You had to laugh at all the awful things he said about everybody, especially the people at Vogue.” In fact, Beaton laughed at everybody except himself, for whom he reserved much compassion & self-pity. His friend Truman Capote described Beaton as a “total self-creation”.

Clever, but not intellectual, good looking but not quite handsome, he just failed to make the grade in those things that he thought mattered the most. Beaton was vain, & he had his clothes made one size too small to flatter his already slim figure, but never glamorous, despite an international lifestyle that brought him into contact with everyone who was somebody for more than 50 years.

Garbo, who he almost married.

Shooting Keith Richards in LA.

He had a burning desire to be part of aristocratic privilege, still going strong in the 1920s & 1930s. Beaton was, what was known at the time, a pansy. With his ambition focused on the British upper classes & American celebrities, his gayness could have been a disadvantage, but he capitalised on it by aiming not at the men, but at their wives. He was a first rate photographer but he was always seemed too eager flatter & please .Having flattered his subjects' bodies & faces, he flattered their egos by placing them in settings reflecting the latest artistic movement, making them seem of the moment. He even managed to make Queen Elizabeth 2 & her family look beautiful & stylish!

Mick Jagger circa 1966

For the last 30 years before his death in 1980 he was at the center of the creative world: royal photographer, designer of sets & costumes for stage & screen, from Oscar Wilde’s comedies to My Fair Lady (for which he won an Oscar for the film version), a chronicler of showbiz figures from Audrey Hepburn to Mick Jagger,for who Beaton had a passion, (Jagger dubbed him “Rip-Van-With-it”). & he kept those diaries that I have been reading, noting everything & revealing the true Cecil Beaton, a mixture of insight, petulance & snobbery, much like the world in which he lived. They reveal the other thing that I suspect in his heart he never forgot: those who are born outsiders must always remain outsiders, after all, outsiders can see things most clearly.

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose & imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."

Born On This Day- Nevember 4th... Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe

The Husband said: “I have seen his work in the USA, but, to experience Robert Mapplethorpe in Venice was just too perfect. You should mention this in your post today”.

We arrived in Venice in October, 1991, & there were banners all over this amazing city for a retrospect of the American artist’s work.The exhibit was held at the Fortuney museum, fabulous in itself. How odd to consider this important gay American artist in another city, & another world, & really kind of perfect. Mapplethorpe’s work deserves a place with the great classic works of art. It was, at the time, the largest retrospect of his work at that time.

This summer I spent time with the very readable- Just Kids, a memoir of the artist/musician/ writer’s friendship, romance & time spent with the remarkable Robert Mapplethorpe. Patti Smith, along with her friend Mapplethorpe, lived a particular New York dream: the Chelsea Hotel, Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, superstardom, to the fullest. I have posted so many times on my love of 20th century photography, & this man’s work & life still hold my full attention.

Ranging from graphic depictions of gay sex to portraits of flowers, Robert Mapplethorpe was all over the artistic map. His work is magnificent in its scope, frequently shocking, & ultimately very beautiful. The more extreme photographs have a tenderness to them, & the seemingly harmless photos generate an edginess that's hard to shake. Simultaneously devoted to a strict sense of formalism & composition & to forging a new iconography of homosexuality, it's easy to see why Mapplethorpe provoked so much controversy in his time.


Robert Mapplethorpe has become the essential “gay photographer.” His homoerotic photographs still disturb, but he made no concessions to the closeted: his work is not sneaky or abashed. He spreads a seductive & provocative version of his style throughout the world & the fashion world bounced his message back to the mainstream. His death from AIDS, in 1989, at the age of 42, gives his short life a special symbolic aura. His iconic position strongly influences how we see his photographs: he is both overrated & underrated. I feel that Mapplethorpe needs to be noted in history as Mapplethorpe- the artist, not just a gay artist, & to be placed in the great tradition of classical art.


The art world, & public funding for the arts in America, is completely different because of his work. His work has been accused of being obscene. So what? Mapplethorpe made & porn the same thing. That is his greatest contribution to American artistry. For me, the most erotic material he produced was his photographs of the sex organs of flowers. That work is startling. You can now google the word "Mapplethorpe" & view of the photographs that caused conservative activists who knew nothing about art, but knew what was moral, to successfully end public funding for the arts. The controversy seems overblown now, but a good look at Mapplethorpe's pictures is enough to verify that he is still cutting edge & still original.

Born On This Day- October 2nd... Photographer Annie Leibovitz

For years I would fantasize that my first album- Jockstraps & Valium would be produced by David Foster & the front & back cover would be shot by Annie Leibovitz. I have posted before of my love of photography & Leibovitz is a seriously major talent to me... I am simply in love her work.

In 1970, Leibovitz approached Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, which he’d recently launched & was operating out of San Francisco. Impressed with her portfolio, Wenner gave Leibovitz her first assignment: shoot John Lennon. Leibovitz’s black & white portrait of the Beatle graced the cover of the January 21, 1971 issue. 2 years later she was named Rolling Stone chief photographer. In 1980 Rolling Stone sent Leibovitz to photograph John Lennon & Yoko Ono, who had recently released their album Double Fantasy. For the portrait Leibovitz imagined that the pair would pose together nude. Lennon disrobed, but Ono refused to take off her pants. Leibovitz “was kinda disappointed,” according to Rolling Stone, & so she told Ono to leave her clothes on. “We took 1 Polaroid,” said Leibovitz, “& the 3 of us knew it was profound right away.” The resulting portrait shows Lennon nude & curled around a fully clothed Ono. Several hours later, Lennon was shot dead in front of his apartment. The photograph ran on the cover of the Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue. In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the best magazine cover from the past 40 years.

Leibovitz has been made a Commandeur des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government & has been designated a living legend by the Library of Congress. Her first museum show, Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990, took place in 1991 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. & toured internationally for 6 years. At the time she was only the second living portraitist & the only woman to be featured in an exhibition by the institution.

Sting by Annie Leibovitz

Leibovitz met writer Susan Sontag in 1989 while photographing the writer for her book AIDS & Its Metaphors. The 2 talents became lovers, but kept separate apartments. They were together until Sontag’s death at the end of 2004. Choosing the closet or not, my admiration for her work knows no bounds.

Sontag by Leibovitz

Born On This Day- September 15th... Pioneer Gay Photographer- Wilhelm von Gloeden

Von Gloeden in self portraits

Before George Platt Lynes, Horst, Bruce Webber, or Richard Avedon, there was Wilhelm von Gloeden. Famous in his own day, his work was mostly forgotten for close to a century, only to rediscovered in recent times as the most important gay visual artist of the pre–WW I era.


 Because of ill health, von Gloeden left his native Germany in 1877, moving to Taormina in Sicily, where he remained until his death in 1931. The mayor of Taormina was the German landscape painter Otto Geleng, who had moved there in 1863. Through him von Gloeden soon became acquainted with the locals. He set up his photographic studio in Taormina, & was exhibiting his work internationally by1890.

Today von Gloeden is mainly known for his male nudes, but in his time he was also famous for his landscape photography that helped popularize tourism to Italy. He took over 7000 images, which after his death were left to one of his models- Pancrazio Buciunì, von Gloeden's lover from the age of 15. In 1933 some 1000 glass negatives from von Gloeden's collection & 2000 prints were confiscated by Mussolini's Fascist police under the allegation that they were pornography & destroyed; another 1000 negatives were destroyed in 1936, although Buciuni was tried & cleared of possessing pornographic images. Most of the surviving pictures are now in the Fratelli Alinari photographic archive in Florence.

 The images that survive are startling for their technical accomplishment: his controlled use of lighting & elegant, classical poses of his models, innovative use of filters & special body makeup to disguise skin blemishes contribute to the artistic perfection of his works, & to their sexual heat. They became popular as postcards in Europe & the USA, often “under the counter”. Von Gloeden was wealthy & shared his profits with his models & funded small businesses in the area, which critics say may explain why the locals tolerated his homosexuality & the increasing tourist trade interested in the young dark skinned young men.

I see connection between the centuries from Von Gloeden to Warhol.

I was familiar with this image for years without knowing about the man responsible.

Born On This Day- September 8th... British Poet Siegried Sassoon

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

& whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed & glum

With crumps & lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home & pray you'll never know

The hell where youth & laughter go.

The grueling years of WW I gave a harsh education in the devastation & futility of war to 300,000+ young British men, including those who grew up in privilege. One of these was the gay "war poet," Siegfried Sassoon.

Brought up in the leisured life of a country gentleman, Sassoon enlisted in the military just as the war was beginning. His poetry reflects the change of his attitudes towards war, beginning with a vision of combat as reflecting glory & nobility, & finishing with muddy, bloody realism & bitter recrimination to those who profited from the destruction of young soldiers. His later war poetry is filled with the ugly realities of the brutality & pointlessness of wars between nations. His later work retains a rather romantic affection for the average soldier, who does his duty with bravery, even when he does not understand why.

 With a cool & savage irony, Sassoon condemns the corrupt old men of government, military, & business, who profits from a war while sending young men off to die. In his poem Base Details:

If I were fierce, & bald, & short of breath,

I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,

& speed glum heroes up the line to death...

& when the war is done & youth stone dead,

I'd toddle safely home & die in bed.

Sassoon's friends, including early feminist author Robert Graves, sensed that his anti-war sentiments could get him into trouble & arranged for him to be hospitalized for shell shock. Always a loyal comrade,Sassoon could not stay away from the front while others fought, & he returned to battle. In July 1918, he was sent back to England with a head wound, & he remained there until the war ended.

Sassoon came of age during the1st golden period of modern homosexual culture. His friends & lovers were some of the best known writers, artists, & thinkers of the period (most of which I have done blog posts about on their birthdays): Evelyn Waugh, Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, J.R. Ackerly, Ivor Novello, Robert Graves, T.E. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Noël Coward, the Sitwells, & members of the Bloomsbury group. He had a long sexual relationship with William Park ("Gabriel") Atkin, a British painter & illustrator. During the 1920s & early 1930s, he engaged in several affairs, including a romance with the future Nazi Prince Philip of Hesse, & a long relationship with poet & decorator Stephen Tennant.

He died in 1967, 7 days before his 81st birthday of stomach cancer. In 1985, Sassoon was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by his former lover & fellow War poet Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, & the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

 
This was the photograph that started my collection of vintage photos of men being affectionate. It was the opening night gift from a fellow cast member. This image started me thinking about the work of Sassoon. I wonder if these men made it home, & possibly had a life together. Haunting.

Sassoon, post-war.

September's Here Again

The sun shines high above
The sounds of laughter
The birds swoop down upon
The crosses of old grey churches
We say that we’re in love
While secretly wishing for rain
Sipping coke & playing games

September’s here again

David Sylvian
1984

Do You Wanna See My Balls?

Just short of needing meds for being compulsive obsessive (alphabetized CDs, color coded closet), I am not afraid to own up being a collector (but not a hoarder). I have posted about collecting certain writers & musical artists. I collect different versions of certain songs- Mack The Knife & Waters Of March, to name 2. I collect river rocks, but only those that hva stripe & are oval. For decades I have been  drawn tocollect orbs, from marbles to bowling balls, globes to gazing balls.

About a year ago, I started posting about my collection of vintage photographs, mostly 1860-1960, of men being affectionate with each other. It is a getting close to being a world class gathering of snapshots & formal portraits. I have been in the process of trying to determine who I can leave them to. I would love to find an institution that would like to preserve this hand-picked archive of men touching, hugging & kissing each other. Some of these photos are framed & put into very tasteful groupings by the Husband, & many I just have in protective sleeves in a box that can be brought out for viewing. They are all treasures to me, but sometimes I will revisit one & really scrutinize & study it, their is power in visiting the past. This one was framed on the fridge & it slipped out of the bottom of its clip-on frame & slid under the appliance. I am so lazy. I took months for me move the thing & retrieve SHO-ME:

I like to consider who the gentlemen are in the photographs, who they might have been & what the meant to each other.

What do you think this scene was all about?

Singles, 3s, or groups? Most of the Vintage Photo Collection are duos & a handsome handful of groups of 3s. There are very few groups, but here are 2 more that I favor:

Click on image to enlarge.