Buoyant and entertaining, this melding of memoir and fiction recounts with humor and candid observation a gay man's romances in his seventies, offering insight into the joys (and a few of the sorrows) of loving, living, and aging with grace, style, and a fearless sense of fun. Bouncing between Montevideo, New York, and Paris, the narrator reveals his adventurous life, his many lovers, his varied careers from dance to advertising, and the upbeat outlook that sustains him as he pursues the elusive Fenil, a handsome Uruguayan policeman. David Leddick's short sketches, interspersed with memories, attitudes, and opinions drawn from the past, combine in a vivid tale of a life lived with panache at an age when most people think the adventure has already ended.
A teenager from the Midwest goes to New York to live temporarily with his uncle and aunt, both high-powered advertising executives. He in no way envisions the major theater career that will be his later. Nor do the people he meetsparticularly the Army veteran who has just returned from military service to the exclusive community north of New York where the teenager finds himself. Surrounded by the rich and famous, being pursued by an older man, all adds up to a world in which the boy never expected to live, and gives him the impetus to pursue his life as an actor-singer-dancer. From the New York stage to major league work at the top of the heap in Las Vegas, he still never forgets the Army veteran he knew in the years past. And he finally decides he must find him.
Photographer George Platt Lynes, painter Paul Cadmus, and critic Lincoln Kirstein played a major role in creating the institutions of the American art world from the late 1920s to the early 1950s. The three created a remarkable world of gay aesthetics and desire in art with the help of their overlapping circle of friends, lovers, and collaborators. Through hours of conversation with surviving members with their circle and unprecedented access to papers, journals, and previously unreleased photos, David Leddick has resurrected the influences of this now-vanished art world along with the lives and loves of all three artists in this groundbreaking biography.
It was interesting to see Leddick's take on Paris in the 1960s. That's when air travel to Europe was just getting started." - Leanne Rylander, Liverpool"When the author went to a lot of these places, Americans were few and far between-a remarkable journey." -Jerry Adams, Atlanta "He certainly offers a fresh perspective on the exotic places he made it to. Places I can only hope I to visit-someday." - Philip Runmeade, Baltimore In another decade of travel well into the 21st Century David Leddick explored South America more fully, even establishing a residence In Montevideo, capital of the tiny country Uruguay wedged between Argentina to the south and widespread Brazil to the north. After renovating his 1890s house in the old quarter of Montevideo, he began to explore Brazil, beginning with Rio de Janeiro, following up with a voyage to Sao Paulo.He interspersed these visits with journeys to Naples in Italy, a favored city. He added to this several sidetrips to nearby glamorous Capri, the Isle where many international travelers go regularly. Returns to South America led to visits to Curacao, Cancun, and Lima. There were added several sidetrips to Panama, squarely between the north and south continents. He now lives very much midway between the North and South Americas in Miami Beach, Florida.
This extraordinary book documents a fascinating moment in the history of American culture - a period in the 1930s, '40s and '50s that give birth to a new notion of male beauty and desire, and to a new type of male icon. Long before Stonewall and the gay pride movement, a small group of daring men - photographers and the models who sat for them - helped pave the way for male sexual liberation. Led by the photographer George Platt Lynes and featuring men such as Jean Marais, Yul Brynner, Paul Cadmus and Tennessee Williams, this group of men - straight as well as gay - shattered taboos surrounding the artistic representations of the male figure. Their ground-breaking work remains as relevant and evocative today as it did half a century ago and its influence can be seen in the work of modern masters such as Bruce Weber, Herb Ritts and Robert Mapplethorpe.
In the 1950's, seventeen-year old Harry Potter moves to Greenwich Village, NY to pursue a career as a ballet dancer. Professionally, he finds a place as a chorus dancer at the old Metropolitan Opera house and becomes a member of the "Sex Squad" --those chorus dancers well built enough to carry off the skimpy costumes in Aida. Personally, he quickly becomes the focul point in a tempestuous, complicated love triangle with two of his fellow dancers. Torn between passion and his true love--dancing--Harry must come to a decision about whom he loves, who he is, and what he is willing to sacrifice for the world of ballet.
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