Nathaniel Choate: Gay African-American Sculptor of 1960s New York

When I was living in New York, I had a friend who lived near the  Klitgord Center,  at the corner of Jay and Tilly Street in Brooklyn, the heart of the New York City College of Technology.  Every day he, and thousands of other people, walked past its gigantic 2-story mural memorializing some of the joys of college: Art, Drama, Music, Recreation, Health, and Recreation.

"Health" was a muscular man on the parallel bars, naked or wearing a skimpy jockstrap.

The Klitgord Center was demolished in 2013.

Recently I investigated the mural, and tried to find out something about the artists.

Sculptor Nathaniel Choate (1899-1965) was one of the few African-American men to graduate from Harvard in the 1920s.  Afterwards he studied in France, and traveled extensively in Morocco and Sudan, perhaps looking for the "good place" that drew dozens of gay men to North Africa.  He returned to the U.S. in the 1930s, and taught in Pennsylvania and New York.  He never married.

His subjects were usually muscular African men, such as "Alligator Bender" at Brookgreen Gardens in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Tile artist Francis Von Tury (1901-1992) was born in Hungary, had a studio in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and was a leading proponent of ceramics as both an art form and an industrial tool.  He never married, either.

Most of his work is stylized, but there are some interesting male figures, like this fisherman on a blue tile.

I don't know if the two men were friends, or lovers, before they began their collaboration.

Donelan: It's a Gay Life

When I was in grad school in Bloomington, I was able to get copies of The Advocate at the adult bookstore.  One of my favorite features was a series of single-panel New Yorker-style cartoons, "It's a Gay Life," by Donelan,  lampooning the culture of 1970s gay neighborhoods: brunch, boyfriends, leathermen, queens, cruising, decorating, activism....

"Oh, please, girlfriend.  Isn't brunch a little too early for attitude?"

Some cartoons were about the reaction of straights, those who knew -- and were ok with it.  In a clueless, stereotyping way.

"I know a homosexual.  George knows a homosexual.  You must have so much in common.  So here we are.

Others who didn't know, and didn't want to know.

"Did your roommate just say he was going to 'freshen his makeup'?"

I was most drawn to the cartoons depicting gay men in pairs and groups.  There was a whole society out there somewhere, a place where being gay was commonplace, even expected, where straights were the interlopers and strangers.

"I'd be more impressed if you could name me one man here you haven't dated."

I wanted that world.

Gerald P. Donelan grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and moved to San Francisco in the 1970s.  He published "It's a Gay Life" from 1978 to 1993.  There were two  reprints of his cartoons: Drawing on the Gay Experience (1987) and Donelan's Back (1988).  His work also appeared in Frontiers and in the Meatmen series of gay comic anthologies.

Today his work seems a bit dated, keying into feminine stereotypes a bit too much.  But in the height of the homophobic 1980s, it was a revelation.

"Tell me again the difference between eclectic and tacky."

See also: Howard Cruse.

Nutcracker Beefcake

Heterosexist plotline aside, every year The Nutcracker gives us the opportunity to see traditional, family-friendly, school-sanctioned, Christmastime ballet written by a gay man.

And loaded to the brim with hot guys in tights.

Not only the Nutcracker-turned-Prince who woos Clara, but the Mouse King, the Cavalier, party guests, soldiers, sentinels, Arabian dancers, Russian dancers -- the list goes on.





















Not a lot of shirtless dancers -- it's set in a Russian winter, after all.  But wander backstage before or after the performance, and you can get a glimpse of Christmas perfection.















More after the break.

Grant Wood: More Than Pitchforks and Cornfields

When I was growing up in Rock Island, we had a lot of local celebrities.  Grant Wood wasn't one of them, even though he was the most famous American artist before Andy Warhol, and he was local, from Anamosa, Iowa, just north of the Quad Cities. He spent his life in the area, overseeing Stone City Art Colony nearby, and teaching at the University of Iowa, about 45 minutes away.

We ignored Grant Wood because of American Gothic, the second most famous painting of all time, and the most parodied.

It gave the Midwest a bad name.  The goggle-eyed farmer with pitchfork looks like he's about to go storming off to protest civil rights, or gay rights, or violence in comic books.  The weepy woman, her beauty faded by the boredom and isolation of farm life, dreams of escape.

Even today, if I admit to being from the Midwest (I usually don't), I get "How awful it must have been for you!  Nothing to do but watch the corn grow and fight all those redneck bigots!"

Um...no.  We had more to do than watch the corn grow: we had symphonies, live musicals, operas, ballets, art galleries, and museums. And about those bigots:  Iowa had the first class in Gay Studies in the world, and was one of the first states to get gay marriage.

So I didn't know much about Grant Wood until I started investigating John Bloom, who sculpted the statue of a naked man that I got for Christmas in junior high.

In 1926, the aspiring artist won a prize for an oil painting, "The Burial," at the Iowa State Fair.  The judge, celebrity painter Grant Wood, invited him to join his new Stone City Art Colony.  For the next two years, they lived together, in a converted ice wagon (rather a small space!). Together they worked on murals for libraries and post offices all over the state.

In 1934, when Grant went to the University of Iowa, he took John with him.

In 1935, Grant married Sara Sherman Maxon (the marriage ended in divorce three years later).  John moved to Davenport, where he married Isabel Bloom in 1938.

Sounded a lot like a spurned lover.

Sure enough.  A new biography, Grant Wood: A Life, by R. Tripp Evans, reveals that Grant was gay.  When he got to the University of Iowa, some faculty members in the Art Department suspected, and they already looked down upon Grant for rejecting the status quo of European Impressionism -- ergo his screen marriage and giving John Bloom the boot.

After his divorce in 1938, Grant had a series of handsome male "roommates."  This riled the homophobic faculty so much that, superstar or not, they wanted him out.  They waited the fall of 1941, when he was on sabbatical, and invited a writer from Time magazine to investigate "sexual improprieties."  The University President managed to put a kibosh on the story and quickly moved Wood into a new division.  However, he didn't get a chance to return to the faculty that loathed him.  He died of pancreatic cancer in February 1942.

But if you look carefully at his work, you can see the glimmers of homoerotic desire.

And even that stupid American Gothic isn't heterosexist.  Everybody thinks the woman is the farmer's wife, but she's his daughter.

N.C. Wyeth: Keeping Gay Desire Hidden

During the first half of the twentieth century, kids who got adventure books as presents, or checked them out of the library, were sure to find beautiful illustrations by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), like this naked warrior in a biography of Charlemagne.

The American regionalist illustrated over 100 books, including The Last of the Mohicans, Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe, The Yearling -- just about everything that boys read for pleasure during that era, making him as famous as Norman Rockwell or J.C. Leyendecker.

He also drew hundreds of magazine covers, advertisements, patriotic images, and murals, as well as a repertoire of 1,000 paintings.

N.C. (Newell) Wyeth belonged to the Brandywine School, known for its dependence on bright, vivid colors, realism to the point of grotesqueness, and serious, ponderous themes.  He frequently offered beefcake images -- two or three pictures in nearly every book display the interplay of muscles on a bare torso or nude backside.  But with two odd quirks:

1. N.C.'s nude men are almost always obscured, their faces hidden or their bodies engulfed in shadow, as in the illustrations from The White Company (left) or The Mysterious Island (below). It's as if displaying the face and physique together would be too dangerous, give too much voice to secret desires.

2. They are almost always in conflict, wrestling, fighting, attacking, subduing or being subdued, as in this illustration from Drums. It's as if he feared what would happen if two men approached each other in respect, friendship, or love.

In real life, N.C. was nothing like his stolid, stable, respectable illustrations would suggest.  He was an aesthete, a gourmand and a bon vivant, who held court in his house in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and summer home in Maine, partying with all of the greats of the Jazz Age, including Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and gay novelist Hugh Walpole.  

More after the break

DH Lawrence and the Naked Cornish Farmer

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was the darling of the grad English students when I was at Bloomington, maybe because he was more accessible than James Joyce or T.S. Elliot, but still Great Literature, and he wrote about sex.

A lot.

The heterosexual girls seemed to gravitate toward Lady Chatterley's Lover (1926), a Harlequin Romance with bad words.

The heterosexual boys liked Sons and Lovers (1913), about a boy who is in love with his mother.

No one ever mentioned Women in Love (1920), and I hadn't yet seen the 1969 movie starring Oliver Reed and Alan Bates (top photo).

Turns out it's about two sisters who become involved with a gay couple.  Actually they're all bisexual.  One of the men dies, and the other is told, "There can't be two kinds of love."

Aaron's Rod (1922) is about a flutist who leaves his wife and kids to go to Florence with his boyfriend and show his "rod" to men and women.

Lawrence was rather critical of heterosexual romance, Instead spinning wild fantasies of all-male Arcadias.

But he also created horribly homophobic characters, and criticized Walt Whitman for his gay subtexts in Studies in Classic American Literature. 

D.H. Lawrence had several same-sex relationships, notably with a farmer named William Henry Hocking, whom he apparently encountered naked on the beach in Cornwall.  He spent the rest of life searching for someone as perfect, just as Ernst Josephson spent his life searching for the "beautiful boy with a violin" he met in Norway.

But he also warned writer David Garnett against pursuing his "homosexual tendencies," and he hated the gay men he met in the Bloomsbury Group, such as Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes; they made him "mad with misery and hostility and rage."

Do you get the impression that this guy was a little nuts?

He tried his hand at painting, and exhibited 25 works at the Warren Gallery in London in 1929.  But they were mostly of nude Italian men with their penises flapping around, including his lover Piero Pini.

The police raided the gallery and seized 13 paintings. They were later returned, on the condition that Lawrence never again show them in England.   When his wife, Freda Lawrence, died in 1956, she willed them to her friend Saki, who willed them to Taos art collector George Sahd.  They're in Taos, New Mexico today.

Priest of Love (1982) stars gay actor Ian McKellen as D.H. Lawrence, Graham Faulkner in a five-second flashback as a nameless Cornish farmer, and Massimo Ranieri (left) as Piero Pini.  It displays his bisexuality in a couple of "you have to be looking for it" scenes.

A Season in Hell: Gay Poet Abandons His Art...and Men

When I was in college , I thought that Charles Baudelaire was gay, because he named his book The Flowers of Evil, and because he was an outsider, looking in on Paris.

I read Arthur Rimbaud's Bateau ivre (1871) and Un Saison en Enfer (1873) -- mostly in English translation, as the French was impenetrable -- and found them both loaded down with homoerotic imagery.

He was definitely gay.

He began his career at the age of 14, sending scandalous letters to established poets.  In 1871, at age 16, middle-aged poet Paul Verlaine invited him to visit, and they began a passionate but volatile affair.  For two years, they scandalized polite society by openly living together in Paris and London, drinking heavily, carousing in public, and writing scandalous poetry.  Finally, overcome with jealousy and despair, Verlaine shot Rimbaud, injuring him in the wrist.

Verlaine spent two years in prison on charges of sodomy (a more serious charge than attempted murder), then returned to his poetic life and had more gay relationships before his death in 1891.

Rimbaud abandoned his art altogether.  He was not yet 20 years old.

He joined the army, worked in a stone quarry, and finally got a job as a coffee merchant in Yemen, where he died at age 37.

Why did he abandon his art?  He never gave an explanation, but his life has has inspired many writers, artists, and directors, even in the days before same-sex relationships could be openly discussed.  Mostly they portray the relationship as inherently evil and destructive to both poets.

There have been two major film versions:

Una stagione all'Inferno (A Season in Hell, 1970) starred Terence Stamp as Rimbaud (left) and Jean-Claude Brialy as Verlaine.  It focuses on Rimbaud, seduced by the evil gay predator, then abandoning his art and the gay "vice" and getting a girlfriend.

Total Eclipse (1995) starred Leonardo DiCaprio (top photo) as Rimbaud and David Thewlis as Verlaine. It takes the opposite tactic, emphasizing Verlaine's downfall as he is mesmerized by the young poet and descends into a "hell" of self-indulgent evil.  They both repent and convert to Catholicism.

And get girlfriends.

My friend Farshad claims to have dated DiCaprio while he was filming in Brussels.

See also:  Nude Photos of Leonardo DiCaprio

Wild Things: The Gay Art of Maurice Sendak

Adults like to think of childhood as a blissful Eden, a period of endless joy, unblemished by anxieties over money or sex or death.  But they're wrong.  Childhood is terrifying and painful, crowded with anxieties over money, sex, and death, dismemberment, abandonment, anger, friendship,  and desire.  Author and illustrator Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) inhabited this world better than any other writer.

He was gay, so several of his books can be read as the struggle of a gay child to make sense of the world, and two are about gay couples.

1. Where the Wild Things Are (1963): Max threatens to eat his mother, and while being punished, runs away to the world of the Wild Things.  He stares them down, becomes their king, and decrees that a Wild Rumpus begin. But he gets homesick and goes home. The 2009 movie added some hetero-romance, among the Wild Things, not Max (Max Records).  There have also been stage plays and a ballet.

2. In the Night Kitchen (1970). An amazingly vivid, scary story of Mickey, who sneaks out of his bed to a surreal night kitchen, where three chefs (all of whom look like Oliver Hardy) are making the breakfast "cake."  He helps them, meanwhile wondering about where his body ends and the natural world begins: "I'm in the milk and the milk's in me."

It has been banned in many schools because the toddler is naked -- don't want five-year olds knowing that five-year olds sometimes have a penis.

Sendak's art for adults often contains penises as well, but never to be salacious, to depict vulnerability rather than desirability.

3. We are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993) is a traditional nursery rhyme with a gay family twist.  Gay partners Jack and Guy find a little boy with "one black eye," a victim of bullying or abuse.  Jack wants to "knock him on the head," continuing the abuse, but Guy suggests that they buy him some bread instead, and "We'll bring him up as other folks do."

4. My Brother's Book (2012). Two brothers are torn apart when a falling star crashes to the earth.  It's a love letter to his partner of fifty years, psychiatrist Eugene Glynn, who died in 2007.  With beautiful watercolors inspired by William Blake.

The Gay Artist for the Catholic Schoolboy Comic Book

A Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact was a Catholic comic book, published every two weeks during the school year from 1946 to 1972, meant to be given away at parochial schools.  Its main emphasis was religion and patriotism (since American Catholics in those days were often stereotyped as anti-American, in the pocket of the Pope).

But there were lots of humor and adventure stories, too -- sports, jungle adventures, pirates -- which made for some odd juxtapositions:

"Get to Know the Sacraments" oddly juxtaposed with "El Vaquero the Cowpunching Bear."

The history of the Canadian Mounted Police juxtaposed with "But Aunt Eileen, does modern life help to destroy true values?"

My favorite juxtaposition is from the November 19, 1959 issue.  "Tarcisius Protects the Holy of Holies," an adaption of the novel Fabiola by Cardinal Wiseman.  Tarcisius was a twelve-year old boy who was trying to save the Blessed Sacrament from desecration, when an irate crowd beat him to death.

How'd you like to read that over your Corn Flakes in the morning?

Next was a humorous story about ice hockey.

Many stories were drawn by Reed Crandall (1917-1982), a Golden Age comic book artist who also drew such superheroes as the Ray, Dollman, Blackhawk and Ka'anga Lord of the Jungle, and invented Firebrand, a muscleman in an invisible shirt.

Why invisible?  So you can perv on his pecs, duh!

He also drew E.C. Horror, the Flash Gordon comic strip, and a series of illustrations for Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan books.

 His beautifully detailed drawings of muscular men inspired a generation of beefcake artists, including Frank Franzetta and Boris Vallejo.

After Crandall graduated from the Cleveland School of Art in 1939, he moved to New York with his mother and sister to seek work in the fledgling comic industry.  Eventually they moved back to Wichita, and Crandall lived by himself, a "confirmed bachelor," for many years.  He died in 1982.

"Confirmed bachelor," right.

I imagine that George A. Pflaum, the publisher of the Treasure Chest, never realized that one of his chief contributors was a gay man.

J.C. Leyendecker: Your Grandfather's Gay Artist

In The Web and the Rock (1940), a classic American novel by Thomas Wolfe, the teenage George goes off to college, where he falls into star-struck, stammering love at first sight with Jim Randolph:

A creature of such magnificence that he seemed to have been created on a different scale and shape for another, more Olympian, Universe. . .he was all the Arrow collar young men, all the football heroes for the covers of the Saturday Evening Post...all the young men in the Kuppenheimer clothing ads, he was all of these rolled into one, and he was something more than all that.

In the early decades of the 20th century, George -- and many other gay men -- depended on advertisements for Arrow collars and Kuppenheimer suits for beefcake. They starred a handsome hunk known as the Arrow Man, drawn by J.C. Leyendecker (1874-1951).

Like Norman Rockwell and N.C. Wyeth, Leyendecker was a famous illustrator who drew hundreds of covers for The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and other magazines. The two artists were friends -- Rockwell was a pallbearer at Leyendecker's funeral.  But their styles and themes could not be more different.

Rockwell:
Small, timid, humdrum lives in small towns.
Domestic spaces
Heternormative boy-meets-girl-themes
Probably heterosexual, though he sometimes crushed on his male models.

Leyendecker
Brash, bold, glittering lives in Manhattan, Hollywood, and Chicago
Homoerotic spaces
Endless beefcake and appreciative male gazes.
Gay, often used his lover Charles Beach as a model.

Leyendecker and Beach lived together for over 40 years, while he produced some of the most homoerotic art outside of Physique Pictorial.  

His work was coded so that gay audiences "in the know" would catch the homoerotic content, while heterosexuals stayed oblivious.

And it worked: heterosexuals never "figured it out."  When he died, his obituaries called him a "lifelong bachelor" survived only by his sister.

Andy Warhol: Gay without Pride

I've been reading the Diaries of Andy Warhol, where the famous pop artist spends about a thousand pages recording how much he spent on cabs during the last ten years of his life (1977-87).  It's tough going.  He knows everybody, and lists them by their first names, so it's hard to figure out who's who.  He spends a lot of time on boring things ("had lunch") and gives promising events a line ("Got a death threat").  He goes to church every day.  He takes a lot of phone calls.

If I didn't know already, I'd have no idea that Warhol was gay.  He mentions attractive men and women both, but he doesn't seem to like gay people.  He complains that a first-name celebrity took him to a benefit, and it turned out to be for fags and lesbians.  He complains about bars being full of fags.  In a restaurant, he discovers that a gay chef made his dinner, and refuses to eat it for fear of contracting AIDS.  He thinks Gay Pride Day is ridiculous (although he doesn't mind photographing the parade).

With all that homophobia going on, what's gay about Andy Warhol?

Homoerotic art, especially early in his career, and films like Blow Job (1964) and Trash (1970).

A homoerotic painting by Jamie Wyeth.

The Factory, where he made his pop art in the 1960s, was a gathering place for bohemians, including drag queens, transgender folk of various types, and rent boys.  That was a lot of visibility for the pre-Stonewall era.

But after Stonewall, Warhol seems to have mostly ran Interview magazine, had lunch with Liza Minelli and Paul Getty Jr., photographed attractive men in their underwear, and complained about fags.

Makes you wonder what the Factory was all about.

Maybe he stopped caring about gays when they stopped think of themselves as sexual outsiders and started fighting for full human dignity?

Gay men and lesbians who think they're just as good as heterosexuals!  How boring!

All accounts state that he was attracted primarily or exclusively to men, but never had a boyfriend, or even a sexual partner.  He preferred to watch rather than touch.