Sissydude Must Have! Turkish Wrestler Print Tank Coming Soon To GODDESS DESIGNER STREETWEAR!
MORE GODDESS STREET WEAR HERE!
ANDREA MARCACCINI IS MY NEW BOYFRIEND!
B&W Images from “Pirate”shoot for ELLE mag.
ph: Danny Cardozo
stylist: Danny Santiago
hairst: Hector Simancas — with Ana Moya Calzado.
Dandy pics by Danny Cardozo
longhorns dance by jim french
PAUL GORMANIS: A 1969 drawing by the artist Jim French reproduced in a 1974 issue of his magazine Manpower!.
French has an international following for his gay-themed photographic + illustrative work, via his Colt Studio image-bank and work as “Rip Colt” and “Luger”. When Malcolm McLaren & Vivienne Westwood clothing collector/dealer PunkPistol alerted me to the existence of the French original I made contact with French’s representative Nat Gozzano, who says: “This was a drawing of Jim’s from 1969 and was originally sold as one of a package of six 5″ x 7″ reproductions called Longhorns .”
Entitled ‘Longhorns – Dance’, it was also reproduced in the book The Colt Album, published by John S. Barrington in 1973.
It also appeared in issue 7 of French’s magazine Manpower!, which was published in 1974. The late McLaren acquired a copy in New York’s Christopher Street early the following year during his period of association with the New York Dolls.
Images via PAUL GORMANIS & HOMODESIRIBUS
Tom Bianchi – Fire Island Pines Polaroids 1975-1983
Growing up in the 1950s, Tom Bianchi would head into downtown Chicago and pick up 25-cent “physique” magazines at newsstands. In one such magazine, he found a photograph of bodybuilder Glenn Bishop on Fire Island. “Fire Island sounded exotic, perhaps a name made up by the photographer,” he recalls in the preface to his latest monograph. “I had no idea it was a real place. Certainly, I had no idea then that it was a place I would one day call home.”
In 1970, fresh out of law school, Bianchi began traveling to New York, and was invited to spend a weekend at Fire Island Pines, where he encountered a community of gay men. Using an SX-70 Polaroid camera, Bianchi documented his friends’ lives in the Pines, amassing an image archive of people, parties and private moments. These images, published here for the first time, and accompanied by Bianchi’s moving memoir of the era, record the birth and development of a new culture. Soaked in sun, sex, camaraderie and reverie, Fire Island Pines conjures a magical bygone era. DAMIANI
Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines
Polaroids 1975-1983
Edited by Ben Smales. Introduction by Edmund White. Text by Tom Bianchi.
Featured image is reproduced from Tom Bianchi: Fire Island Pines.
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Tom Bianchi – Printing of Fire Island Pines Polaroids 1975-1983 from Tom Bianchi on Vimeo.
An excerpt from the VICE interview with Bianchi:
VICE: And you happened to be there with a fancy, new Polaroid camera, too.
BIANCHI: I was a lawyer at Columbia Pictures at the time. At an executive conference in Miami, we were given an SX-70 Polaroid camera. It was this little plastic thing, which I took to Fire Island a little while later and started taking pictures of my friends. At the time, a lot of people were still in the closet so, as you can understand, they were extremely wary of having their picture taken. So, the important thing about this camera was that it allowed me to take the picture and a few minutes later put it out on the table for people to take a look. It made everyone immediately more comfortable and I very quickly formed the intention to show the world what a cool, amazing place the capital of Queerdom was. Or the provincial part of it [laughs].
VICE: Leafing through the book, I can’t help but notice that everyone in the pictures is unbelievable hot.
BIANCHI: Well, the reason is twofold. Gay men in my generation were called pansies or poofs – we had been raised to have very negative feelings about ourselves. It was around our time that more and more guys began to discover gyms, too. And the more guys went from ordinary looking men to “Oh, my God, look at that stud,” the more of a no-brainer it became that you had to be as close to perfect as possible. Suddenly this really beautiful community of men emerged, and they all boarded planes, trains, or buses to Fire Island every weekend.
At the same time, I wanted my sexual partners to be really beautiful, hot guys. And I never wanted anyone to think I was using my camera to seduce people, so for the most part the intimate pictures are of people I had relations with.
VICE: And then HIV came along. The sense that I got from reading your book is that the disease set the gay rights movement back quite a few years.
BIANCHI: I think it’s the opposite. I think what happened was that we were kids, partying along, thinking we were untouchable, immortal. AIDS forced us to grow up.
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW @ VICE!
MORE PICS AFTER THE JUMP…
The Dapper Rebels of Los Angeles, 1966 (photos from LIFE magazine) via messy nessy chic
MESSYNESSYCHIC: In the summer of 1965, riots broke out in the Watts neighborhood of southern Los Angeles. Over a six-day period, 34 people were killed, 1,032 injured and over 3,438 arrests were made. In 1966, LIFE magazine revisited the site of the worst riots America had ever seen in its history. The photo essay depicting the region’s ‘fearsome street gangs’ however, turned out more like a fashion shoot for dapper style…
TEDDY GIRLS via Messy Nessy Chic (via Jenn W) photos by Ken Russell
MESSYNESSYCHIC: You might have heard of the Teddy Boys, a 1950s rebel youth subculture in Britain characterized by an unlikely style of dress inspired by Edwardian dandies fused with American rock’n roll. They formed gangs from East London to North Kensington and became high profile rebels in the media. But an important sub-subculture of the Teddy Boys, an unlikely female element, has remained all but invisible from historical records. Meet The Teddy Girls.
These are one of just a few known collections of documented photographs of the first British female youth culture ever to exist. In 1955, freelance photographer Ken Russell was introduced Josie Buchan, a Teddy Girl who introduced him to some of her friends. Russell photographed them and one other group in Notting Hill.
After his photographs were published in a small magazine in 1955, Russell’s photographs remained unseen for over half a century. He became a successful film director in the meantime. In 2005, his archive was rediscovered, and so were the Teddy Girls.
Russell remembers 14 year-old Teddy Girl, Jean Rayner: “She had attitude by the truckload. No one paid much attention to the teddy girls before I did them, though there was plenty on teddy boys. They were tough, these kids, they’d been born in the war years and food rationing only ended in about 1954 – a year before I took these pictures. They were proud. They knew their worth. They just wore what they wore.”
SISSYDUDE LOVES: Ulyana Sergeenko Haute Couture SS 2013
Russian designer Ulyana Sergeenko.
This elegant romance was shot by photographer Nickolas Sushkevich against the simple regal backdrop within the Hotel De Crillon Paris,
inspired look of the day: bob benson’s beach attire!
It was hard not to stare at the legs of Bob Benson (played by James Wolk) in these fish-covered short shorts. And that was Bryant’s intent. ”They were a vintage pair that we found at one of the costume shops and we rented them,” Bryant told InStyle.com. “Bob is whimsical in his own way, and I always wanted him to wear colors that were always just a little off. I felt like that was just part of his personality. He’s always saying these funny quirky lines and has this funny way about him, so I loved the idea of him having colors that were just a tad… off. You do get a sense about him that he’s very much the overt people-pleaser. He’s really fun to dress.”
‘if you want apples you have to shake the tree’ by william selden (via homotography)
HOMOTOGRAPHY: The Summer 2013 ‘The Time Is Now’ issue of i-D magazine features this fantastic story ‘if you want apples you have to shake the tree’, photographed by William Selden and styled by Simon Foxton, with hair by Teiji Utsumi, makeup by Isamaya Ffrench and set design by Gary Card. The featured models include Chuck Achike, Nahel Drici, Jamie Baah-Mensah, Tom Gaskin and Declan-John Geraghty.
Mark Mitchell’s Burial Line (via Grant)
Winner of “Best Interview” at Hot Docs in Toronto.
Short documentary made for the 5 day Documentary Challenge about Mark Mitchell, a costume designer from Seattle, WA.
Mark Mitchell’s burial line will be released this fall 2013
Mark Mitchell from Mike Skoptsov on Vimeo.
