Band of Thebes

Born February 19: Pim Fortuyn, Beth Ditto

The conservative Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was openly gay to a degree that's unimaginable here: On national television he explained that he enjoyed the taste of semen, comparing it to a strong liqueur, and he cited his hook-ups with North African and Arab men as "proof" that he wasn't racist. Dutch voters, for and against him, were more interested in his ideas. He wanted to cut government's role in health services and education, he spoke against the "Islamisation of our culture," sounded a warning cry about the dangers of shari'a law superseding the Dutch legal code, and pledged to cut immigration drastically. Yet he was also for euthanasia, for legalized soft drugs, for same-sex marriage, and for reducing the military by combining the army and air force to save money. Although Fortuyn was riding a crest of widespread popularity with fully fifty percent of voters aged 18-30 supporting him (huge in a multi-party system), the Netherlands did not get to have their first ever openly gay Prime Minister, because they had their first assassination in 330 years, since 1672. A white Dutch man shot Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting "the weaker parts of society to gain political power." The motive was unrelated to Fortuyn's being gay. The killer, thirty-two, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Fortuyn was fifty-four. Contrarian even in death, Fortuyn was buried twice, first in the Netherlands, then dug up and re-interred in Pordenone, Italy, where he owned a second home.

Grace Kelly, Marilyn, Marlene, and Charlize rock to Beth Ditto in this famous Dior tv spot shot at Versailles [after the jump]. That song, Heavy Cross, from her post-punk band Gossip (formerly The Gossip, formed fifteen years ago in Olympia), was an international smash: With 97 weeks on the singles charts it was the second longest-staying song ever on the German charts (now it ranks sixth). If it somehow makes sense that the Arkansas native who claimed to have eaten squirrel meat growing up would become the indie darling of the alt music world -- playing every festival from Coachella to Glastonbury to SxSW, with NME naming Gossip "the greatest punk rock’n’roll disco soul band on the planet" -- it is perhaps still a surprise, given the extreme body fascism of the billion-dollar beauty industry, that Beth could become a face of fashion. Yet she was Glamour's International Artist of the Year in 2008, appeared nude on the debut issue of London's LOVE magazine in 2009, and in 2010 walked the catwalk herself, opening Jean Paul Gaultier's spring collection during Paris fashion week. In 2012 the band released their fifth studio album and Beth published her memoir Coal to Diamonds [Kindle] co-written with Michelle Tea. Last summer, barefoot in Maui, in a gown Gaultier designed for her, she married her girlfriend Kritsin Ogata, who wore tailored shorts and sneakers. Today she's 33.

Born February 14: Kevyn Aucoin

Long before Bridegroom [watch now] there was Keyvn & Jeremy.

The world's most famous makeup artist "married" his much younger boyfriend in an unofficial ceremony in Hawaii in July 2000 and after that Kevyn Aucoin referred to Jeremy Antunes as his husband. In less than two years, the man who easily earned $10,000 a session doing makeup for superstars' cover shoots or Oscar appearances, the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers about beauty, the only makeup professional ever honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the founder of a new line of beauty products bearing his name, was dead at forty, without a will. His husband was locked out of their two shared homes without any legal recourse. Aucoin's estate went to his adoptive parents back in Louisiana who embody more than their share of contradictions: Initially repelled by homosexuality, they started the first PFLAG chapter in Lafayette yet refuse to give their son-in-law even the bed he shared with Kevyn.

It's possible that Kevyn and Jeremy were on the verge of breaking up, or experiencing a typical rough patch in what might have been a long marriage. Jeremy had left a sick and hurting Kevyn to go to Paris for a week alone, which sounds selfish and indulgent but could be seen as a tough ultimatum to someone ruinously addicted to many kinds of pain killers and sleeping pills, who had in the preceding six months dropped out of two programs to overcome substance abuse, and who had screwed up his friend Cher's "Song for the Lonely" video shoot (needing to be hospitalized twice) so notoriously that not one star had asked him to do her makeup for the Oscars that spring. In any case, Jeremy's trip was cut short by Kevin's final hospitalization. Those pills were to relieve Kevyn's intense suffering from acromegaly, a pituitary gland disorder that causes excessive growth and had given him an ever enlarging brain tumor, undiagnosed since he was nine years old, at which time he had already discovered makeup.

From childhood, his ambition for glamor and success was matched by his generosity of spirit. Two ex-boyfriends continued to work closely with him and even after he had achieved his own fame, he took enormous pleasure and considerable time to do makeup for shopgirls, neighbors, and even the homeless teenage drag queens of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, of which he was a vociferous supporter. Topping the wildly devoted praise by Cher, Janet, Tina, Tori, Gwyneth, Liza, Courtney, and Celine, Mary Tyler Moore said, "There were three men in my life I met who had the ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the world just by looking at you, just with their eyes: One was Sinatra, the other was Pope John Paul II, and the third was Kevyn." Despite his instructions that his ashes be scattered in Hawaii where he was married, Kevyn's parents are keeping his cremated remains in Louisiana because they like to visit him.

Born January 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose [Kindle]. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the recent Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression." Last year Alexander Wang, 29, replaced Ghesquière as creative director.

Despite his success and his peerless status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in Spain.

Born January 16: Susan Sontag, Francesco Scavullo

Born in New York City in 1933, Susan Rosenblatt [Sontag from her stepfather] came out to her diary at 15, had her first experience with a woman at 16, and married Philip Rieff at 17. Having started at Berkeley, she graduated from the University of Chicago and by 25 she was a divorced mom soon living with the writer Harriet Sohmers Zwerling. Toward the end of their relationship Susan had an affair with Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, who was Harriet's ex. After breaking up with Maria, she lived with Italian aristocrat Carlotta Del Pezzo. Later partners were the German academic Eva Kollisch, Rothschild banking heiress/actress Nicole Stéphane, and choreographer Lucinda Childs. In 1978, twelve years after Against Interpretation (including her seminal essay Notes on Camp), she won the NBCC for her critical book On Photography, teeing up the penultimate irony of her love life, her last and longest romantic relationship was with Annie Leibovitz. Ten years on, in 1999, the world's most famous photographer and America's leading intellectual collaborated on a book unambiguously called Women yet the media still refused to mention the co-authors were lesbian partners. In 2000 Susan finally won the National Book Award (for her fourth novel, In America, less popular than her breakout third, The Volcano Lover) and in 2001, at 52, Annie gave birth to a daughter. In 2004, at 71, Susan died after a decades-long fight with cancer and her obituary omitted Annie. An old-time believer in the "open secret," Susan berated others' moral cowardice yet remained mostly closeted, though she did tell the Guardian she had been in love nine times in her life: "five women, four men." Her As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964--1980 appeared on Thebes' queer lit poll. For another view read Terry Castle's terrific essay "Desperately Seeking Susan" in The Professor.

Because he made a career of pushing glamor toward tacky, with his models sporting his signature huge windblown hair and Way Bandy's way too much makeup, it's easy to overlook the admirable aspects of Francesco Scavullo's sixty-three years as a fashion photographer. After learning the craft from Horst P. Horst, he published his first cover shot when he was still in his teens and he died of a heart attack when he was eighty-two on his way to photograph Anderson Cooper in 2004. The man was a workhorse. Born on Staten Island, his family moved to Manhattan when he was six, and his father bought him a carriage house when he was nineteen, which he used as his studio for the rest of his life. Some of his most memorable images are Diana Ross's b&w cover and full-color foldout for Diana, the Kristofferson - Streisand poster for A Star Is Born, the Julie Andrews poster for Victor/Victoria, Brooke Shields everywhere, the Bee Gees on the cover of Rolling Stone, Madonna on the cover of Time, and Sting in a loincloth. He shot Beverly Johnson for Vogue's first cover of a black woman and Burt Reynolds nude for Cosmopolitan's first centerfold. Scavullo lived for thirty-two years with Sean Byrnes, who not only managed and styled his shoots but nursed him through four nervous breakdowns in his ongoing manic depressive cycles. Among his many books are Scavullo: Photographs 1948-1984 and Scavullo on Men.

 

Born January 14: Yukio Mishima, Cecil Beaton

Brilliant writer and fascist militant nut, Yukio Mishima published forty novels, many collections of stories and essays, and was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize before, at 45, launching a deranged coup attempt against the Japanese government with four other men immediately after which he and another committed ritual suicide. Mishima wrote his first book in his early twenties and became a celebrity at 24 with his bestselling second novel, the autobiographical gay conformity story Confessions of a Mask. While that book chronicled a solitary experience, bigger shocks awaited in his novel Forbidden Colors exploring Tokyo's vast gay subculture. In dreaming of an all male world it also gave voice to Mishima's misogyny and gave rise to his dedication to a hyper-masculine ideal of beauty, starting with himself. He detested intellectuals' emphasis on the mind, instead espousing a life of physicality, muscle, and action, which led to increased scenes of sadomasochism and gay rape in his fiction and greater vanity in his life. On a hardcore workout regimen, he began posing nude for gay photographers and acting in movies. Highlights of his prolific output are The Sound of Waves, a hetero love story so popular it's been filmed five times; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; and his Sea of Fertility tetralogy beginning with Spring Snow. In 1998 Jiro Fukushima published a book about his affair with Mishima and Mishima's son and daughter successfully sued him for invasion of privacy and copyright violation for quoting their father's letters to him.

Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England's leading Shakespearean scholars in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father's timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world of design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit.

Versatile in his talents, Beaton also designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his long unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a "terrible, terrible homosexualist" and that shame never fully disappeared. He had a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.

Click here, to re-read Sandy Leonard's immortal Beaton/Coral Browne memory.

Born November 19: Morris Kight, Calvin Klein

In 1958, when native Texan Morris Kight arrived in Los Angeles, he was almost forty and ready to fight for gay rights, but he considered the Mattachine Society elitist. In reaction, he co-founded the third outpost of the Gay Liberation Front, after New York and Berkeley. One of their earliest battles was against a West Hollywood diner called Barney's Beanery which had a painted sign and printed matchbooks with the misspelled warning Fagots Stay Out. After three months of protests, sit-ins, and media glare, the owner removed the original sign, but as soon as the attention subsided, he remounted an identical sign and kept it on display until 1984. In June 1970 to celebrate the first anniversary of Stonewall, Kight helped organize Christopher Street West, which was only permitted after he, Troy Perry, and the ACLU sued reluctant city officials and the hostile police department for the right to have a parade.

Kight's proudest moment came in October 1971, when he and two other activists opened the nation's first gay and lesbian community center. With his sometimes abrasive strategies and leftist politics, Kight had many detractors within the movement. One of those was David Goodstein who transformed the Advocate from a newspaper to a magazine and prohibited his reporters from writing about Kight and other people he thought hurt the image of gay rights. Kight's protest of anti-gay Coors created a public disaster for Outfest, which had finally convinced the brewery to sponsor their film festival. He was also a vocal critic of 1978's proposed amendment to ban gay teachers from public schools. In January 2003, Kight donated his 3,000-item collection of art, papers, and memorabilia to the ONE Institute. Three days later he died, at eighty-three, survived by his partner of twenty-five years, Roy Zucheran.

I was his official escort (ha!) at the Stonewall 25 rally in New York. He was awesome and very, very cranky when the announcer called him Morris Knight.

Poor Calvin, 71 today and alone. As a young man he was protégé of the ne plus ultra of Old World sophistication -- the elegant, Paris-born, never-married, gay Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, banker, fashion editor of of Town & Country and Vogue, and Best Dressed Hall of Famer who favored the subtle, grayed palette and understated cut on which Calvin has built his empire  -- and after two tasteful lavender marriages Calvin finally comes out with a protégé of his own of sorts, a boyfriend 49 years his junior, named Nick, who's just trash. Baron Nikky would not approve. Now split for good, Nick Gruber, washed up at 23, in and out of rehab, frequently arrested for fights, last summer was thrown out of the A-list Fire Island fundraiser Ascension for a hissyfit in which he threw punches and told the VIP homos to quit touching him because's he's NOT GAY, which he still claims. He later apologized but quote hates labels and is "STRAIGHT." As for other statements of non-reality, Nick also claims he 'never said' anything about book writing, even though the media has copies of the tell-all proposal Obsession: My Life with Calvin Klein co-written by Lisa Arcella that they shopped to every publisher in New York. Are you ready for the sad part? Like Liberace with Scott Thorson, Calvin wanted Nick to look like him and "the proposal speaks of the new clothes, haircut and teeth Klein fitted Gruber with, turning him into a younger version of the designer. Klein also supposedly booked, 'a steroid doctor to help [Nick] keep his lean and pumped look,' gave Nick skin resurfacing and set him up with 'speech therapy to upgrade his speaking style.'" Happily, Calvin's real child, his daughter Marci, turned out better. At 46, she's won four Emmys for producing Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock. 

Also, Poor male models! So you can say you learned something today: According to Forbes, 2013's highest paid male model in the world, Sean O'Pry, earned only $1.5 million (compare, please, to the highest paid girl model's $42 million). The #9 male model made a measly $290,000. See all ten and be shocked.

Gay Kiss in Trailer for Yves Saint Laurent Biopic

Niney nails it. Pierre Niney plays YSL in the first of two competing biopics, Yves Saint Laurent, which for once has not been degayed and may give his partner Pierre Bergé (played by Guillaume Gallienne) the importance he deserves.

Releasing next May, the other biopic, called Saint Laurent, features pretty Gaspard Ulliel and Jérémie Renier (the Dardenne brothers regular), as the magnetic couple. It also stars Léa Seydoux, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, and Louis Garrel.

Masculin / Masculin Image of the Day #15

Glimpsed in the trailer above, Jeanloup Sieff's 1971 nude shot of Yves Saint Laurent is one of many formal portraits in Masculin / Masculin. 

I'll spare you Eminem.

300 Years of Queer Fashion

Your favorite gay curator has done it again. Jonathan Katz makes up for everything the Met's Costume Institute has ignored all these years: On display at FIT through January 4, A Queer History of Fashion showcases about 100 ensembles spanning 300 years.

Get the catalog A Queer History of Fashion: From the Closet to the Catwalk.

The publisher: "From Christian Dior to Yves Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen, many of the greatest fashion designers of the past century have been gay.  Fashion and style have played an important role within the LGBTQ community, as well, even as early as the 18th century.  This provocative book looks at the history of fashion through a queer lens, examining high fashion as a site of gay cultural production and exploring the aesthetic sensibilities and unconventional dress of LGBTQ people, especially since the 1950s, to demonstrate the centrality of gay culture to the creation of modern fashion.  
 
"Contributions by some of the world’s most acclaimed scholars of gay history and fashion – including Christopher Breward, Shaun Cole, Vicki Karaminas, Jonathan D. Katz, Peter McNeil, and Elizabeth Wilson – investigate topics such as the context in which key designers’ lives and works form part of a broader “gay” history; the “archeology” of queer attire back to the homosexual underworld of 18th-century Europe; and the influence of LGBTQ subcultural styles from the trouser suits worn by Marlene Dietrich (which inspired Yves Saint Laurent’s “Le Smoking”) to the iconography of leather. Sumptuous illustrations include both fashion photography and archival imagery."

Simon Doonan's Asylum

Rebounding from last year's Gay Men Don't Get Fat, Simon Doonan delivers a fashion gabfest in his sixth book The Asylum: A Collage of Couture Reminiscences...and Hysteria [Kindle]. Overworking the similarities between the glamor industry and the mentally ill, he remains at sixty-one resolutely old school queeny gay -- skipping, whooshing, shrieking over his man bag, making tasteless jokes -- with an iron strength beneath the glitter. If you follow the fashion world, go for it. If you don't, you can still enjoy observing a Firbank character navigate the 21st century. 

Avoid Slate's excerpt of the book about what we've lost to aids, which lacks all his talents for quick character sketches, ear for dialog, and eye for folly.

By far his best book is his most personal, Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints [Kindle], a funny, angry, touching memoir about growing up gay in unfabulous Reading, England. As the ever-quotable David Rakoff said on its publication, "If you were ever younger than you are now, you must read this book."

Born August 14: Joe Eck, Horst P. Horst

After 42 years in love, 33 of them at their ravishing 27-acre North Hill Garden in Vermont, and a lifetime total of two quarrels, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd were working on their fourth book together, when Wayne died of a heart attack at 68 in 2010. Alone, Joe didn't step foot in the garden, skipped every meal, collapsed, and ended up in the hospital for a week. Little by little, he returned to life and eventually finished To Eat: A Country Life [Kindle]. Each of the 35 short chapters begins with an enchanting line drawing by Bobbi Angell depicting the food under discussion: apples, chard, potatoes, winter herbs, wild salads, Egyptian onions, etc. and continues with just the right blend of historical, personal, and cultivating details. Four chapters describe their farm animals, including a herd bull who was the son of the queen's herd bull at Balmoral and a pig named Rolo who died of bleeding ulcers from loneliness. About half the chapters end with a recipe or two, some from Beatrice Tosti di Valminuta of Il Bagatto in the East Village. Many more recipes can be found in Eck and Winterrowd's excellent Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill. Even better, with more detail about their lives and their flowers, are their two longer books Our Life in Gardens [Kindle] and A Year at North Hill : Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden. Earlier, alone, Eck wrote Elements of Garden Design.

Horst patriotically joined the U.S. army as a photographer in July 1943, three months before he became a U.S. citizen. (He was German, born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann but chose to be Horst P. Horst because he was known by his first name and to distance himself from the Nazi officer Martin Bormann.) By then he had been famous for eleven years, thanks initially to lesbian Janet Flanner's New Yorker review of his Paris show in 1932, and he had already shot Dietrich, Davis, Crawford, Coward, Schiaparelli, Chanel, and Garbo, as well as his most famous photograph, The Mainbocher Corset. He had already had an affair with his mentor George Hoyningen-Huene, who took this photo of Horst age twenty-five in 1931 and had dated future-filmmaker Luchino Visconti; and he was five years into his relationship with former British diplomat Valentine Lawford, with whom he would stay for sixty-one years. Together, they adopted and raised a son, Richard J. Horst. Out of favor and largely ignored in the 70s, Horst made a comeback starting in 1980 when Life hired him to shoot nine photos. In 1990, David Fincher used Horst's signature light-and-deep-shadow style to create Madonna's video Vogue, even reenacting his Mainbocher Corset shot. Horst continued to work until close to his death at ninety-three in 1999.

Born August 1: Yves Saint Laurent

Are any three letters as elegant as YSL? When he was seventeen, Yves Saint Laurent began working for Christian Dior, who referred to him as his dauphin. When Dior died suddenly four years later, Saint Laurent was made head of the fashion house, but soon he was conscripted to serve in the Algerian war. Hazed by his rougher fellow soldiers, the fragile couture artiste lasted twenty days before he had a nervous breakdown. The army tried to cure him with electroshock therapy. When he returned to Dior, he found he had been replaced. He started his own house, giving rise to some of the most famous clothes in history: the Mondrian dress, "le Smoking," the tuxedo for women, the designer leather jacket, the sheath dress, the gold cape. For nearly twenty years he and his business manager Pierre Bergé were lovers, and, after they broke up they continued living together for another ten years. In 1983, Saint Laurent became the first living designer to be honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a retrospective. In 1993, he and Bergé sold the company for $600 million. After his retirement in 2002, Saint Laurent spent much of his time in Marrakech, where he restored and opened to the public the vivid gardens originally designed by French expat Jacques Majorelle. He died in June 2008 (most newspapers degayed his obituary, calling Bergé, who announced his death, "a friend" or omitting him) and his ashes are interred in the garden. At his funeral in Paris, Catherine Deneuve read a poem by Walt Whitman. The Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, a powerhouse in aids research and funding, also operates his haute couture studio as a gallery showcasing fashion. Two great photo books are Yves Saint Laurent and Yves Saint Laurent: Style.

Born March 23: J.C. Leyendecker

In the early 20th century when Arrow had 94% of market share, much of the shirtmaker's success could be laid with illustrator J.C. Leyendecker -- he used his chiseled boyfriend as the model for the archetypal Arrow Collar Man. Born in Germany in 1874, Leyendecker moved with his family to Chicago when he was eight. He and his brother enrolled at the city's Art Institute before studying art nouveau at the Académie Julian in Paris. They returned to Chicago early in 1899 and by May Leyendecker received his first commission for a cover of the era's most famous magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Throughout his career he would draw 321 more covers for them, creating the genre of "adorable" domestic chaos, stirring patriotism, family holidays, lovers' foibles, and youthful high spirits (with scrawny nudity) that today we associate with his Eve Harrington protege and successor Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker was slight and disliked confrontation; when his friends warned him Rockwell was stealing his style, he didn't protest. (Being a gay man and an immigrant in the early 20th century may also have amplified his instincts to avoid trouble.) One area in which he maintained preeminence was the blatant homoerotic. Leyendecker's men eternally give one another penetrating looks inside, outdoors, and on deck, and they're always thrusting elongated objects at happy angles from their bodies. He never met a muscle that didn't need to beef up, ripple, or glisten under his expert touch. As his biographers   explain, “Neighboring artists shared models with the brothers, which meant a seemingly endless train of attractive Greenwich Village lads parading through their chilly studio in the buff.” One was named Charles Beach. He was 17 and Leyendecker was 28. By all accounts Beach was both hot and not, given to self aggrandizing claims that he did Leyendecker's work (despite not being able to draw), along with the more typical fits of jealousy, insecurity, and tyranny. Margo Channing Norman Rockwell complained he never heard Beach say anything intelligent and called him "stupid." Nevertheless, Leyendecker and Beach moved into a New Rochelle mansion together and threw luxe parties attended by the jazz age set including Scott and Zelda. Inevitably, times changed, the commissions dwindled, and the money ran out. They had to dismiss their staff yet they stayed together a total of 49 years, until Leyendecker's death in 1951 when he instructed his private papers be destroyed. For more, read J.C. Leyendecker.

Leyendecker's artist brother F.X. Leyendecker also had an eye for masculine muscle, as with this barechested blacksmith, and for strategically placed missiles between shirtless swabbies (compare below). He became addicted to drugs and killed himself at 47.

    

    

Born February 14: Kevyn Aucoin

The world's most famous makeup artist "married" his much younger boyfriend in an unofficial ceremony in Hawaii in July 2000 and after that Kevyn Aucoin referred to Jeremy Antunes as his husband. In less than two years, the man who easily earned $10,000 a session doing makeup for superstar celebrities' magazine cover shoots or Oscar appearances, the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers about beauty, the only makeup professional ever honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the founder of a new line of beauty products bearing his name, was dead at forty, without a will. His husband was locked out of their two shared homes without any legal recourse. Aucoin's estate went to his adoptive parents back in Louisiana who embody more than their share of contradictions: Initially repelled by homosexuality, they started the first PFLAG chapter in Lafayette yet refuse to give their son-in-law even the bed he shared with Kevyn.

It's possible that Kevyn and Jeremy were on the verge of breaking up, or experiencing a typical rough patch in what might have been a long marriage. Jeremy had left a sick and hurting Kevyn to go to Paris for a week alone, which sounds selfish and indulgent but could be seen as a tough ultimatum to someone ruinously addicted to many kinds of pain killers and sleeping pills, who had in the preceding six months dropped out of two programs to overcome substance abuse, and who had screwed up his friend Cher's "Song for the Lonely" video shoot (needing to be hospitalized twice) so notoriously that not one star had asked him to do her makeup for the Oscars that spring. In any case, Jeremy's trip was cut short by Kevin's final hospitalization. Those pills were to relieve Kevyn's intense suffering from acromegaly, a pituitary gland disorder that causes excessive growth and had given him an ever enlarging brain tumor, undiagnosed since he was nine years old, at which time he had already discovered makeup.

From childhood, his ambition for glamor and success was matched by his generosity of spirit. Two ex-boyfriends continued to work closely with him and even after he had achieved his own fame, he took enormous pleasure and considerable time to do makeup for shopgirls, neighbors, and even the homeless teenage drag queens of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, of which he was a vociferous supporter. Topping the wildly devoted praise by Cher, Janet, Tina, Tori, Gwyneth, Liza, Courtney, and Celine, Mary Tyler Moore said, "There were three men in my life I met who had the ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the world just by looking at you, just with their eyes: One was Sinatra, the other was Pope John Paul II, and the third was Kevyn." Despite his instructions that his ashes be scattered in Hawaii where he was married, Kevyn's parents are keeping his cremated remains in Louisiana because they like to visit him.

Born January 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose [Kindle]. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the recent Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression." The California native and current New Yorker Alexander Wang, 28, will replace Ghesquière as creative director, the company announced last month.

Despite his success and his peerless status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.

Grace

 Three years ago the world beyond a few gay fashion enclaves in New York, London, Paris, and Milan found out about Grace Coddington when she outshone her boss Anna Wintour in the documentary The September Issue. In an industry obsessed with youth and the new next thing, she has been Vogue's creative director for decades and this year turned 71. Even more rare: She is the only woman in the world who can say she lives in Chelsea with a straight male hairdresser who has been her boyfriend for thirty years. It has not all been a fairytale. Her dad died when she was 11; her modeling career [left] ended with a car crash; her two marriages were short mistakes; and her sister died leaving Grace an 8 year-old boy to raise. She recently gave an interview saying it wouldn't hurt young designers to have “a few things going wrong in their life... I mean, I hate to say it, but it teaches you a hell of a lot, you know.” The proof is in her book Grace: A Memoir [Kindle], on sale Tuesday. It's filled with her own drawings, like this one showing Anna getting pinned by Sarkozy, and greatest hits photos from the visionary shoots she dreams up, like this Norman Parkinson stunner from the 70s. 

Born August 1: Yves Saint Laurent

Are any three letters as elegant as YSL? When he was seventeen, Yves Saint Laurent began working for Christian Dior, who referred to him as his dauphin. When Dior died suddenly four years later, Saint Laurent was made head of the fashion house, but soon he was conscripted to serve in the Algerian war. Hazed by his rougher fellow soldiers, the fragile couture artiste lasted twenty days before he had a nervous breakdown. The army tried to cure him with electroshock therapy. When he returned to Dior, he found he had been replaced. He started his own house, giving rise to some of the most famous clothes in history: the Mondrian dress, "le Smoking," the tuxedo for women, the designer leather jacket, the sheath dress, the gold cape. For nearly twenty years he and his business manager Pierre Bergé were lovers, and, because they are French, after they broke up they continued living together for another ten years. In 1983, Saint Laurent became the first living designer to be honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a retrospective. In 1993, he and Bergé sold the company for $600 million. After his retirement in 2002, Saint Laurent spent much of his time in Marrakech, where he restored and opened to the public the vivid gardens originally designed by French expat Jacques Majorelle. He died in June 2008 (most newspapers degayed his obituary, calling Bergé, who announced his death, "a friend" or omitting him) and his ashes are interred in the garden. At his funeral in Paris, Catherine Deneuve read a poem by Walt Whitman. In 2009, Bergé sold most of their possessions at a record-shattering auction earning $484 million.

Rockumentary of Openly Gay "American Bowie" Jobriath

Although selling Jobriath as an "American Bowie" was wishful thinking, the story of openly "fairy" glam rocker Jobraith in 1973 and 1974 should make a fascinating documentary. Jim Farber, a talking head in the film, which screens Saturday night at Walter Reade, writes in today's Daily News:

"Jobriath (ne Bruce Wayne Campbell) recorded two albums in 1973 and ’74 that both benefited, and suffered, from historic hype. As you might expect from an aspiring rocker of the day, his albums sounded like David Bowie aping Mick Jagger, but with enough classical and theatrical flourishes to give it an original twist. Many New Yorkers of the era will remember the garish advertizing for Jobriath’s self-titled debut. Gigantic posters of the man not only adorned city buses, they occupied a looming billboard in Times Square, depicting him as an ancient Roman statue, dyed blue, and in the nude, no less.

"Suffice it to say, they were as discussed, and giggled over, as the muscled Marky Mark posters that appeared in that same space, courtesy of Calvin Klein, more than two decades later.

"Music fans may also remember the star’s famous self-description - “I’m rock’s truest fairy,” a banner meant to distinguish him from the rush of pseudo-gay, and faux-bisexual, stars who ruled the glam-rock trend of the early to mid-’70s.

"The original idea was to provide a more outrageous, U.S. answer to the sexually equivocating David Bowie, a notion advanced by Jobriath’s scheming manager, Jerry Brandt.

"The P.R. backfired spectacularly, not only because America wasn’t quite ready for such a creature, but also because of the hard sell behind it. Though Jobriath crafted his inventive music with esteemed classic rock producer Eddie Kramer, and while he got good reviews from Rolling Stone, Esquire spoke for many when it dubbed him “the hype of the year.”

(Hat tip and thanks to J "Ziggy" K.)

Born April 23-24: Wonner, Benson, Halston, Jónsi

An abstract expressionist of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Paul Wonner (1920-2008) maybe wasn't Diebenkorn but his early and middle works endure. Above are his Sarah Vaughn Singing (1963) and Woman with Flowers (1961). For more than fifty years he was partners with Theophilus Brown who, at 91, is said still to paint every day in San Francisco. In the 1960s they lived in Santa Monica and were friends with the locals, William Inge, Andre Previn, Isherwood and Bachardy, Eva Marie Saint and her husband. The Guggenheim, SFMoMA, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum are among the many institutions that collect Wonner's work.

You think you got a big diary? A.C. Benson’s was bigger. Humungous, in fact. His lifelong journals stretched beyond four million words (or, five times more than Shakespeare's collected works), until his death in 1925. He taught at Cambridge and wrote a bestselling collection of essays called From a College Window, as well as many other books. Undoubtedly he is best remembered today not for his poetry but for writing the lyrics to the patriotic song Land of Hope and Glory. Benson was one of six children of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson; none of the children ever married and two of his brothers were also gay.

Born in Des Moines, graduated from a high school in Evansville, Indiana, Roy Halston Frowick had shed the Midwest along with his first and last names by the time he designed Jackie Kennedy’s iconic inauguration pillbox hat when he was twenty-nine. Soon after, he began designing clothes, which were standouts for their elegance and simplicity. As famous for his perpetual partying at Studio 54 as he was for his fashions, Halston was the first designer to understand the power of licensing his brand. His name appeared on everything from scarves to eyeglasses to perfume to the uniforms for airlines and rental car companies, yet because he was a perfectionist unable to delegate any designing to his staff, he cracked under enormous pressure. The firm that bought his company asked him to design a clothing line for J.C. Penney, and when he did so, Bergdorf’s stopped carrying his clothes and many longstanding clients decamped to other designers. Ultimately he was fired from his own company and legally barred from designing under his name. He left New York for San Francisco and died of aids in 1990.

Who’s that playing his guitar with a bow like a cello? And who sings the end credits song "Sticks and Stones" in How to Train Your Dragon? Why, it’s Jónsi, of course, the lead singer of that other Icelandic musical sensation, Sigur Rós. They followed the worldwide success of their 1999 post-rock album Ágætis byrjun, with 2002’s album called ( ), which was sung entirely in Vonlenska, or Hopelandic, a made-up language of nonsense syllables. Because it sounds similar to Icelandic, it’s an open question whether people in other parts of the world could tell any difference, but those fans would at least have noticed that the accompanying lyrics booklet was left blank for listeners to write their own meaning of the words. Sigur Rós’s songs have been used in movies by Greg Araki, Cameron Crowe, and Wes Anderson, as well as on numerous tv shows, and they’ve sold more than two million albums. Jónsi is 100% supergay and in 2009 released an album called Riceboy Sleeps with his boyfriend under the moniker Jónsi and Alex [Somers, an American]. He released his first solo album Go in 2010. Last year he reteamed with Cameron Crowe, scoring his feel-good family film We Bought a Zoo starring Matt Damon.

ASME Magazine Award Finalists

Another off year for nominations [after the jump] from the American Society of Magazine Editors. Surely these were not the very best stories of 2011 nor were these five the finest photo features. Down from last year's nine noms, The New Yorker got six this year, but none in fiction. New York also earned six. One thing ASME did nail: David Grann's fantastic fact piece, "A Murder Foretold," already optioned by Hollywood. Strange that the press release lists only the magazine and title, omitting authors or photographers. I had to google each title to find the fiction writers.

FICTION

The Atlantic for “Scars,” by Sarah Turcotte, Summer 2011
McSweeney’s Quarterly for “Ambition,” by Jonathan Franzen, April
McSweeney’s Quarterly for “The Northeast Kingdom,” by Nathaniel Rich, August
Virginia Quarterly Review for “La Moretta,” by Maggie Shipstead, Fall
Zoetrope: All-Story for “The Hox River Window,” by Karen Russell, Fall

FEATURE PHOTOGRAPHY

National Geographic for “Taming the Wild,” March
The New York Times Magazine for “Touch of Evil,” December 11
TIME for “Portraits of Resilience,” September 19
Vogue for “Lady Be Good,” March [Amber & son, above by Steven Klein]
W for “Planet Tilda,” August  [below by Tim Walker]