Montgomery Clift, 1951

Prince Felix Felixovich Yusupov

 

Prince Felix Yusupov by Linse. The Yusupovs were the wealthiest family in Russia. They owned dozens of estates and palaces and Prince Felix Yusupov was married to the niece of Tsar Nicholas II, Irina Alexandrovna. The prince is best remembered for his involvement in the murder of the mad monk Rasputin in the Yusupov family’s palace in St Petersburg. He was able to escape to Paris in 1917, taking many fine family jewels.

The Moika Palace or Yusupov Palace  was once the primary residence in St. Petersburg, Russia of the House of Yusupov. The building was the site of Grigori Rasputin's murder in the early morning of December 17, 1916.

He was born in the Moika Palace in Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire. His father was Count Felix Felixovich Sumarokov-Elston, the son of Count Felix Nikolaievich Sumarokov-Elston. Zinaida Yusupova, his mother, was the last of the Yusupov line, of Crimean Tatar origin, and very wealthy. For the Yusupov name not to die out, his father (5 October 1856, Saint Petersburg – 10 June 1928, Rome, Italy) was granted the title and the surname of his wife, Princess Zenaida Nikolaievna Yusupova (2 September 1861, Saint Petersburg – 24 November 1939, Paris) upon their marriage, on 4 April 1882 in Saint Petersburg.

Zinaida and Felix Yusupov at a ball "in traditional Russian costume", 1903.

The Yusupov family, richer than any of the Romanovs, had acquired their wealth generations earlier. It included four palaces in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg), three palaces in Moscow, 37 estates in different parts of Russia (Kursk, Voronezh and Poltava), coal and iron-ore mines, plants and factories, flour mills and oil fields on the Caspian Sea.

Portrait of Felix Yusupov (1903) by Valentin Serov

Felix led a flamboyant life. "At twelve he began wearing his mother's gowns. He describes in his autobiography often spending time with Gypsy bands and adopting female clothing. His older brother took him often to restaurants and cafés". Felix became one of the richest men in Russia after his older brother, Nikolai Felixovich, Count Sumarokov-Elston (1883-22 June 1908), had an affair with a married woman and was killed on Krestovsky Island in a duel by the jealous husband, Arvid Manteuffel, in the summer of 1908. From 1909 to 1913, he studied fine arts at University College, Oxford, where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club, established the Oxford University Russian Society. Yusupov was living on 14 King Edward Street, had a Russian cook, a French driver, an English valet, a housekeeper, and he spent much time partying. He owned three horses, a macaw and a bulldog called Punch. He smoked hashish, played polo and became friendly with Luigi Franchetti, a piano player, Jacques de Beistegui, who both moved in. At some time, Yusupov got acquainted with Albert Stopford and Oswald Rayner. He rented an apartment in Curzon Street, Mayfair, and met several times with the ballerina Anna Pavlova, who lived in Hampstead.

Princess Irina Alexandrovna of Russia with her fiance Prince Felix Yusupov, 1914

Back in Saint Petersburg, he married Princess Irina of Russia, the Tsar's only niece, in the Anichkov Palace on 22 February 1914. The bride was wearing a veil that had belonged to Marie Antoinette. The Yusupovs went on their honeymoon to Cairo, Jerusalem, London and Bad Kissingen, where his parents were staying.

In exile

One week after the February Revolution, Nicholas abdicated the throne on 2 March. Following the abdication, the Yusupovs returned to the Moika Palace before they went to Crimea. They later returned to the palace to retrieve jewels (containing the blue Sultan of Morocco Diamond, the Polar Star Diamond, and a pair of diamond earrings that once belonged to Marie-Antoinette) and two paintings by Rembrandt, the sale proceeds of which helped sustain the family in exile. The paintings were bought by Joseph E. Widener in 1921 and are now in the National Gallery in Washington, DC. In Crimea, the family boarded a British warship, HMS Marlborough, which took them from Yalta to Malta. On the ship, Felix enjoyed boasting about the murder of Rasputin. One of the British officers noted that Irina "appeared shy and retiring at first, but it was only necessary to take a little notice of her pretty, small daughter to break through her reserve and discover that she was also very charming and spoke fluent English." The Yusupovs founded a short-lived couture house Irfé, named after the first two letters of their first names. Irina modeled some of the dresses the pair and other designers at the firm created. They became renowned in the Russian émigré community for his financial generosity. Their philanthropy and their continued high living and poor financial management extinguished what remained of the family fortune. Felix's bad business sense and the Wall Street Crash of 1929 eventually forced the company to shut down.

On September 27, 1967, Prince Felix Youssoupoff passed away in his modest Paris home.

Irina and Felix enjoyed a happy and successful marriage for more than 50 years. When Felix died in 1967, Irina was stricken by grief and died three years later He was buried in Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery, in the southern suburbs of Paris. Yusupov's private papers and a number of family artifacts and paintings are now owned by Víctor Contreras, a Mexican sculptor who, as a young art student in the 1960s, met Yusupov and lived with the family for five years in Paris. It seems that Felix had never abandoned his pursuit for men.

Classic Bodybuilder Helmut Riedmeier

Helmut Riedmeier (born May 14, 1944 in Munich ) is a German former bodybuilder . He was Mr. Europe five times and Mr. Universe twice .

2001 International British Master Champion

1997 United Kingdom Championship (over 50) – 1st place

1996 NABBA Masters Mr Britain - 1st place

1995 NABBA Masters Mr Britain - 1st place

1983 IFBB European Mens Championships - 5th place

1974 NABBA Professional Mr. Universe - 1st place

1972 Mr Europe - 1st place

1972 IFBB European Mens Championships - 1st place

1971 IFBB European Mens Championships - 2nd place

1971 FFCPAS Mr.Europe - 2nd place

1971 IFBB Mr. Universe - 1st place

1971 NABBA Professional Mr. United Kingdom - 1st place

1970 IFBB European Mens Championships - 1st place

1970 NABBA Mr. Universe - 2nd place

1970 Mr Europe - 1st place

1969 IFBB Mr World - 5th place

1968 NABBA Mr. Universe - 2nd place

1966 NABBA Mr. Universe - 5th place

1966 Mr Europe - 2nd place

1965 Mr Europe - 1st place

1965 Mr. Germany - 1st place

1964 Junior Mr. Germany - 1st place

Daniel Carmago - Stuttgart Ballet

Daniel Camargo (born September 1991) is a Brazilian ballet dancer. He joined the Stuttgart Ballet in 2009, and was promoted to principal dancer in 2013. In 2016, he left to join the Dutch National Ballet, before leaving in 2019 to pursue a freelance career. In 2022, he joined the American Ballet Theatre.

Christopher Isherwood by George Platt Lynes, 1948

Anthony Perkins, 1959.

Gary Cooper

Gary Cooper on a Beach

Gary Cooper and Fredric March

 

a young Alan Bates

Bates was married to actress Victoria Ward from 1970 until her death in 1992, although they had separated many years earlier. They had twin sons, born in November 1970, the actors Benedick Bates and Tristan Bates. Tristan died following an asthma attack in Tokyo in 1990.

Bates had numerous gay relationships, including those with actor Nickolas Grace and Olympic skater John Curry as detailed in Donald Spoto's authorised biography Otherwise Engaged: The Life of Alan Bates. Spoto characterised Bates's sexuality as ambiguous, and said, "he loved women but enjoyed his closest relationships with men". Even after homosexuality was partially decriminalised in Britain in 1967, Bates rigorously avoided interviews and questions about his personal life, and even denied to his male lovers that there was a homosexual component in his nature.While throughout his life Bates sought to be regarded as a ladies' man or at least as a man who, as an actor, could appear attractive to and attracted by women, he also chose many roles with an aspect of homosexuality or bisexuality, including the role of Rupert in the 1969 film Women in Love and the role of Frank in the 1988 film We Think the World of You.

In the later years of his life, Bates had a relationship with the Welsh actress Angharad Rees and in the last years, his companion was his longtime friend, actress Joanna Pettet, his co-star in the 1964 Broadway play Poor Richard. They divided their time between New York and London.

Bates died of pancreatic cancer in December 2003 after going into a coma. He is buried at All Saints' Church, Bradbourne in Derbyshire.

Shirtless Boris Karloff posing for sculptor Ivan Simpson, photo by Ray Jones

Tennessee Williams, Photo by Irving Penn

Was John Wayne Bisexual?

Different Perspectives.

according to the source who outed him, John Wayne was “queer as a two-headed trout.” I first came across the news that Wayne was light in the spurs when I was staying at a kitschy old out-of-the-way hotel in the Valley called the Sportsmen’s Lodge. I got to chatting with a long-time hotel employee who began dishing dirt about some of the famous people he had come across during his long tenure there. His favorite, he said, was Bogie who used to tip him with a $50 bill and a Cuban cigar. His next anecdote threw me for a loop, however. “John Wayne used to come here all the time,” he recalled. “He was a pansy, you know.” In a million years, I would have never guessed that “He used to come by in the afternoon with men to go fishing in the pond and then they’d take a room and he’d say he was in ‘conference’ and that he shouldn’t be disturbed. We all knew what that meant and one of the chambermaids told us that she once caught him getting a blowjob from a guy. But unlike some of the other stars who came by with men, Wayne didn’t like them too young. His friends were usually in their twenties or even older, but none of them were famous, at least not the ones he would rent a room with.” http://ianundercover.com/

The Surprisingly Risque World of Society Painter John Singer Sargent

 

John Singer Sargent self portrait

Factoids to impress your friends from the new portrait exhibition at the Met

by 

James Tarmy

June 25, 2015, 8:30 AM CDT

It’s easy to peg John Singer Sargent—whose best-known portraits are of stiff-backed children and elaborately dressed socialites drowning in tulle—as a fluffy society painter of the rigid late-Victorian era. To wit, the biggest scandal of his career involved a portrait of “Madame X,” aka socialite Virginie Amelie Avegno Gautrea, with a lasciviously draped dress strap falling onto her shoulder. (Gasp!)

But Sargent (1856–1925) was infinitely more freewheeling than his better-known works would imply. In the exhibition Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, which opens on June 30 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a different kind of painter emerges.

“The show demonstrates that he moved very easily through these circles of progressive society,” says Stephanie Herdrich, who co-curated the show. “Many gay men, flamboyant performers, intellectuals, he was very comfortable with all of them.”


There are 91 portraits of just these characters in the show (along with another 21 drawings from the Met’s collection), which range from the famous—Claude Monet, Robert Louis Stevenson, W.B. Yeats, and Henry James—to random characters whom Sargent encountered as he bounced around Europe and North America. We’ve chosen a few of the most notable examples, the radical feminists and captains of industry and flamenco dancers, who present a neat alternative to Sargent’s reputation as a fussy painter of the upper crust.

Dr Pozzi at Home, 1881 - John Singer Sargent

The Parisian Samuel-Jean Pozzi palled around with royalty and wrote one of the first major textbooks on gynecological surgery. He was an early patron of Sargent, and, among other things, collected antiquities, sculpture, and tapestries. Viewers of the portrait, where the doctor lounges in a crimson bathrobe while fingering his lapel, will probably not be surprised to learn that he was also considered “a sensualist and an aesthete,” according to the catalog.

John Singer Sargent, Léon Delafosse, c. 1895-8

Léon Delafosse, whose patron was Comte Robert de Montesquiou, was a celebrated pianist and composer and friend of the Parisian beau monde, including Proust. “Sargent was so intimately a part of these circles,” Herdrich says. “We think of him quickly dashing off society portraits, but he was deliberately seeking out these intellectuals.” Still, there was a question of accessories. As Sargent wrote to a friend: “Of course Delafosse is a decadent especially in the matter of neck-ties—but he is a very intelligent little Frenchman.”

John Singer Sargent, Man Wearing Laurels, 1874-80

Lord Dalhousie (1900). John Singer Sargent. Oil on canvas. 101.6 x 152.4 cm. Private collection

John Singer Sargent

George Platt Lynes- Donald Windham and Tennessee Williams (1940s)

J.C. Leyendecker

Before Rockwell, a Gay Artist Defined the Perfect American Male

By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — August 28th, 2012

J.C. Leyendecker in 1895.

Nobody had to tell J.C. Leyendecker that sex sells. Before the conservative backlash of the mid-20th century, the American public celebrated his images of sleek muscle-men, whose glistening homo-eroticism adorned endless magazine covers. Yet Leyendecker’s name is almost forgotten, whitewashed over by Norman Rockwell’s legacy of tame, small-town Americana.

Rockwell was just an 11-year old kid when Leyendecker created the legendary “Arrow Collar Man” in 1905, used to advertise the clothing company’s miraculous detachable collars. One of America’s first recognizable sex symbols, this icon of masculinity was defined by his poise and perfection, whether on the sports field or at the dinner table. Like the Gibson Girl, the Arrow Collar Man developed a singular identity, equal parts jock and dandy, who supposedly received more fan letters than silent film heartthrob Rudolph Valentino. To top things off, Leyendecker’s men were often modeled after his lover and lifetime companion, Charles Beach, making their secret romance a front-page feature across the U.S.

Leyendecker’s painting of Mercury, the god of speed, for Collier’s in 1907 draws from classical sculpture.

Born in 1874, Joseph Christian Leyendecker emigrated with his family from Germany to Chicago in 1882 and soon began apprenticing with illustrators. After a brief stint studying art in Paris, Leyendecker returned to Chicago, where he established relationships with renowned magazines like “Collier’s” and “The Saturday Evening Post,” for whom he would ultimately design 322 covers. While Leyendecker was also known for his depictions of apple-cheeked children and elegant women, it was his stern, brooding men who created the greatest impact. With their strong jaws and perfectly tailored clothes, Leyendecker’s men were featured in the pages of newspapers and magazines across the globe, selling everything from luxury automobiles to socks. Leyendecker’s fictional world of affluence and beauty influenced other pop-culture touchstones, like the fantastic setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” As fashions changed and the U.S. entered World War II, Leyendecker’s career slumped, curbing his extravagant lifestyle. After his death of a heart attack in 1951, Leyendecker left few assets for his partner, Charles Beach, and many of his original paintings were sold at a rummage sale for $75 each. Alfredo Villanueva-Collado, a former literature professor at the City University of New York and established collector of Bohemian art glass, filled us in on his J.C. Leyendecker collection and the fascinating story behind this oft-neglected male image maker.

This 1932 Leyendecker cover image for the “Saturday Evening Post” literally puts the near-naked male on a pedestal.

Collectors Weekly: How did you first discover J.C. Leyendecker? Villanueva-Collado: My partner was a graphic artist, and when we first arrived to the U.S. we were really into the Arts and Crafts movement. But, of course, his thing was graphics, and when we started researching, we found out there was life before Norman Rockwell. And then we found out what kind of life, and we went, “What? Leyendecker’s gay? No, it can’t be.” It freaked me out, and I’ve never been in the closet. I first realized Leyendecker was gay from the subtext, and then went looking for evidence through my research, and the evidence was there. It was often mentioned in passing, since the intimate details only came out later. Leyendecker knew very well he couldn’t break barriers; he could only suggest the subject. As a literature professor, I was fascinated by the semiotics of Leyendecker’s images, because I know a lot of gay artists had to use what I call the “palimpsest technique.” Palimpsest refers to the fact that parchment used to be so expensive they would have to paint it over to write something new, and that is the essence of semiotics, the text that is hidden beneath the visible text. Especially in literature, in anything having to do with gays, it’s been done to perfection. You have to hide it, not expose it like you can today.

In this 1907 Leyendecker painting for Arrow dress shirts, all eyes lead to the dapper man in brown.

Leyendecker had a fascination with asses, with muscles, and it was so evident. I kept wondering, how come nobody else says this? It’s right in your face, for heaven’s sake. I found it extremely interesting that there were three brothers–of which both Frank and J.C. turned out gay–and a sister, Augusta, who never married. Both of the Leyendecker brothers were in Paris at a very crucial moment in 1884. They absorbed the academic French way of drawing, but it was also the time when Baron Von Gloeden’s photographs were all over the place. Von Gloeden was gay and also idolized the masculine body. This went contrary to the contemporary worshipping of the female body as a siren or as a vampire, and foretold–I hate to say–the Nazi aesthetic, the worship of the male body. But they didn’t know that, and that was not their intention.

Collectors Weekly: When did Leyendecker first paint Charles Beach? Villanueva-Collado: J.C. was 29, but Beach, who must have been quite a hunk, was only 17. For the first few years, the brothers kept an apartment here in New York, and Beach had some kind of residence nearby. But then when the Leyendeckers moved to their mansion in New Rochelle in 1914, which J.C. had built, Beach moved in with them. Their sister, Augusta, apparently hated him from the moment she saw him. Beach not only became Leyendecker’s favorite model but also the man who ran the household, and their relationship lasted 50 years. They hosted these crazy 1920s Belle Epoch parties that Beach organized, and the crème de la crème of New York society went there. I was totally flabbergasted when I found references in “The Great Gatsby.” Then I found out that people like Fredric March, George Hamilton, and a lot of other very famous males posed for Leyendecker. And then, of course, Leyendecker’s sexuality should have been very clear with his Interwoven Sock ads, which Beach posed for. When I first posted these images on Collectors Weekly, I said “I’m going to get into real trouble now” because you don’t debunk an idol. But this is not debunking; this is what he was.

Cleanliness is next to godliness: This atypical Ivory Soap advertisement from 1922 features a priest.

In his Ivory Soap commercials, there are these languid column-like figures, very statuesque pseudo-brothers or priests. This monk is holding up a bar of soap. The text reads, “Ivory Soap: It floats.” Since when do you use a man to sell soap? A friend of mine found a fascinating Internet posting called Leyendecker Studies, which included originals for both sides of the Kuppenheimer ad. In the Trojan warrior study, I noticed the helmet bore no crest. But in the finished Kuppenheimer advertisement for “Trojan Weave,” it does feature a crest, immediately below the word “Trojan.” While researching the history of Trojan condoms I found out they hit the market at the beginning of 1927. One detail caught my attention: the maker’s stated purpose to eschew overt or offensive sexual references, so the logo was to be a simple Trojan helmet, implying strength and protection. I looked for images of the packaging. Even today, a crested helmet is their logo! Therefore, it can be assumed that in 1927 Leyendecker changed his Trojan warrior’s helmet, adding the crest as a sly reference to the new latex condom that had just hit the market. Talk about semiotics and palimpsests. I’m amazed that this particular artist was able to get away with so much, as the foremost male image maker of the ’20s and ’30s. The American people swore by these images, and the Arrow Collar Man received fan letters by the ton from women. But the gays were probably petrified.

Some of Leyendecker’s most monumental works were for the Kuppenheimer clothing company. The men in this 1929 ad, all resembling Charles Beach, seem to be paying more attention to each other than their gorgeous mermaid friend.

Advertisement for Kuppenheimer's John Barrymore suits, 1927

Arrow ad, 1929

Arrow advertising, 1912

Collier's cover, 1916

Easter, 1936