Inside the photos of James Bidgood – the godfather of homoerotic fantasy

With just a quick glance at photographer James Bidgood’s work you’re transported to a homoerotic dreamland of Disney-esque narratives infused with total campness. As a stylistic precursor to photographers David La Chapelle and Steven Arnold, Bidgood’s images turned 1960s-70s queer sex workers and porn artists into rainbow popping and glitter glimmering mermaids, genies, angels, and matadors that queerified the fantasy canon in a pre-Stonewall context where you could be killed for being overtly gay. With this unabashed queerness, Bidgood’s legacy spotlights the importance of fearlessly and proudly asserting one’s identity in art.

It’s this exact pride that is celebrated in the Museum of Sex’s current show James Bidgood: Reveries showing until 8 September 2019 in New York. Reveries unites Bidgood’s work across covers for early gay porn magazines and his avantgarde homo-erotic films to explore his impact on both gay art history, and the proliferation of gay history itself. “Bidgood’s photos are unapologetic records of pure visual pleasure,” reflects Reveries curator Lissa Rivera. “The colours, the lighting, attention to detail and reference to tropes of glamour are celebratory.”

“Bidgood’s photos are unapologetic records of pure visual pleasure” – Lissa Rivera

Born in Wisconsin 1933 at the height of the great depression, Bidgood escaped to the artistic utopia of New York at age 18 where he plunged himself deep into the underground. Like many of the queer artists before and after him, including Mark Morrisroe and David Wojnarowicz, Bidgood immersed himself in porn and hustling as a means of survival and artistic expression. He also became a drag queen named Terry Howe and a set and costume designer at New York’s notorious Club 82. While his experiences as a hustler allowed him to explore the harsh reality of being queer in 1960s New York and led him to many of his subjects and muses, it was his roles at Club 82 that enabled him to create the distinct technicolour style that he is known for today.

Using the scraps of costumes and set props from his job and his tiny Hells Kitchen apartment as his setting, Bidgood started to photograph elaborate homo-erotic fantasies in the early 1960s after attending Parsons School of Design. “Bidgood had very little, but used whatever resources he had to create images that depicted gay men and male sex workers (otherwise socially marginalized at the time), as enchanting and lovely,” states Rivera. “Using technicolour palettes, Bidgood revealed queer sexuality to be every bit as beautiful and glorious as a Gene Kelly dance sequence. Whilst in Hollywood closeted film artists sublimated their sexuality, Bidgood tipped his work a little further to reveal the latent homoeroticism within popular culture.”

While his costuming stemmed from his work, his homo-erotic eye drew on pornographic 1950s-60s physique magazines for which Bidgood would later shoot the covers of including The Young Physique and Muscleboy. What Bidgood brought to these magazines was a glorification of queer porn, taking it’s photography out of the tropes of simple sexuality, and into the world of homo-erotic fantasy because he believed gay men deserved to be glorified. Other references that can be seen in Bidgood's work include the fantastical impressionist painter Maxfield Parrish and homo-erotic figurative painter George Quaintance. 

“Whilst in Hollywood closeted film artists sublimated their sexuality, Bidgood tipped his work a little further to reveal the latent homoeroticism within popular culture” – Lissa Rivera

“Bidgood’s photos works were first published as gay erotica under his pseudonym Les Follies des Hommes,” states Rivera. “Originally, his photographs and colour slides were distributed by mail-order from back page ads in physique magazines. Willing clients would send in a fee and in turn, would receive a photo set of prints made by Bidgood at a local drugstore lab.” Largely shot in a pre-Stonewall era where queer Americans faced discrimination daily, Bidgood’s nude glorification allowed the artist to speak of themes such as queer desire, as well as liberating the queer body from hetero-policing and creating a new form of escapism from the harsh reality of America’s streets.

Bidgood’s first film was his 1963-71 production Pink Narcissus, which drew on MGM musicals and adopted the same fantastical lens to film a narrative around actor (and muse) Bobby Kendall who, according to Bidgood, was a narcissist doused in pink. Because of Bidgood’s insular status as a creator working only within his close-knit worlds, when the film was released it was actually first credited to Andy Warhol. “Bidgood’s images’ originally fell outside of art history proper,” Rivera reflects. “Underground queer filmmakers working congruently, like Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol were more connected to avant-garde communities. Bidgood was in a parallel, yet more isolated universe, using similar tropes of early Hollywood and unabashed sexuality, though in a more insular way.”

Rivera continues: “Bidgood worked within a creative universe of his own making in a tiny Hell’s Kitchen studio, actually living within his intricate sets. In this world, queerness was beautiful and revered – although, in the world outside, the situation was quite different. Those he invited to star in his photographs were friendly to him and happy to be in the spotlight of his creations. Bidgood’s film Pink Narcissus illustrates this well; a handsome hustler dreams inside a bejewelled bedroom of Disneyesque queer fantasies, while life outside his room is depicted as more nightmarish – with the scarier aspects of sex work in Times Square shown as phantomlike and grotesque..”

Despite Bidgood’s critical impact of photography, he remained largely unknown for nearly 40 years. In the 1990s, Bidgood was rediscovered with a string of retrospective exhibitions at esteemed galleries like London’s National Portrait Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. His work can now also be found in collections at the Tate Modern. Perhaps Bidgood’s most outstanding legacy is the way he opened both queer photography and photography itself to a new world of aesthetics, trickled down most identifiably to the work of David La Chapelle. “When Bidgood was re-discovered in the 1990s, his work was quickly embraced by the art world,” says Rivera. “His anonymous work had unbeknownst to him, grown to be quite influential, taking on a life of its own. Bidgood’s queering of the visual language of early colour film and advertising elevated camp with technical perfection. Beyond queer culture, there has been a major revival in the use of Bidgood’s signature gel lighting, as can be seen in the work of Petra Collins and many others.”

James Bidgood: Reveries is showing until 8 September 2019 at New York’s Museum of Sex. You can find out more here