It would have been the 90th birthday today of The Goddess Who Walked Among Us, our Patron Saint Dame Elizabeth Taylor...
All hail.
CAMP: "A cornucopia of frivolity, incongruity, theatricality, and humour." "A deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love." "The lie that tells the truth." "Ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to or characteristic of homosexuals."
Sunday, 27 February 2022
Monday, 21 February 2022
It's a Look...
Richard Quinn
Yes, the madness that is London Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2022 is upon us - in fact, it ends tomorrow, and we hardly even noticed it was on!
[click any photo to enlarge]
Saturday, 19 February 2022
Thursday, 17 February 2022
Cigareets and whisky and wild, wild women?
More Gay History month material, I hear you ask! - well, how about these two most extraordinary women..?
Marion Barbara 'Joe' Carstairs [PDF] (1st February 1900 – 18 December 1993) was a wealthy British power boat racer known for her speed and her eccentric lifestyle. She usually dressed as a man, had tattooed arms, and loved machines, adventure, and speed. Openly lesbian, she had numerous affairs with women, including Oscar’s niece Dolly Wilde, Greta Garbo, Tallulah Bankhead and Marlene Dietrich.
During WWI she served in France with the American Red Cross, driving ambulances. In 1920, with three former colleagues from the Women's Legion Mechanical Transport Section, she started the 'X Garage,' a car-hire and chauffeuring service that featured a women-only staff of drivers and mechanics. In 1925 she inherited a fortune through her mother and grandmother from Standard Oil. In 1934, Carstairs purchased Whale Cay, an island in the Bahamas where she lavishly hosted guests such as Dietrich and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
As Joe Carstairs’ lover and secretary, she spent freely and lived very much for the moment - she even turned the kitchen in the house they shared into a bar. Apart from a prodigious appetite for drink, Ruth Baldwin used both cocaine and heroin, and enjoyed partying and had a penchant for fighting over the multiple women in her life.
She once told Carstairs, “The world is one’s oyster if taken at will.”
When Carstairs purchased her first motorboat, Baldwin gave her a Steiff doll that Joe named Lord Tod Wadley, which became her lifelong totem of good luck.
Joe had clothes made for him in Savile Row and had his name placed with her own on the name plaque on the door of her London apartment at 5 Mulberry Walk in Chelsea. She had him photographed in various tableaux and carried him with her on official business - everywhere but when she was racing her boats, for fear he might be lost.
Carstairs' friends described Ruth Baldwin thus: “She was wild. She was such fun. Ruth, she was really wild.” However her wild life caught up with her, as she died of a suspected overdose at a Chelsea party at the home of Gwen Farrar on 31 August 1937, while her friends, among whom was Dolly Wilde, listened to a boxing match in the next room.
Carstairs was bereft. She crossed the Atlantic from Whale Cay aboard the French liner Normandie, the most expensive ship in the world, and took Baldwin's ashes along with her to Whale Cay, where she built a church to house them. When she sold Whale Cay, she removed the ashes.
When Carstairs died in Naples, Florida, in 1993 at the age of 93, Lord Tod Wadley was cremated with her. Their ashes and those of Ruth Baldwin were buried in Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor, New York.
Monday, 14 February 2022
La voce d’angelo
“Miss Renata Tebaldi was always sweet and very firm. She had dimples of iron.” - Rudolf Bing, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York
How remiss of me to have completely overlooked another important centenary a couple of weeks ago - that of La Tebaldi, one of the greatest ever voices in opera, a legendary diva who was adored in her native Italy and dazzled audiences both at La Scala [she was one of the key performers at its opening gala after the war] and the New York Met over three decades. No less a figure than the legendary maestro Toscanini described her as having “La voce d’angelo” ["The voice of an angel"].
She was also fearless in the face of competition from rival divas, most notably the notoriously temeramental Maria Callas. From the ABC Classic radio station site:
As early as 1950, Maria Callas had shown signs of growing resentment towards Tebaldi, the then-reigning prima donna at La Scala, with Italian devotees divided into Tebaldi and Callas camps.Callas only began to sing regularly at La Scala in 1951 and always had a very fractious relationship with the house. How real the animosity was on a personal level continues to be disputed. Their voices and repertoire couldn’t have been more different. Tebaldi was essentially a lyric soprano who valued beauty of sound above all, Callas a dramatic artist who sang 19th-century bel canto opera.
In 1951 things came to a head when both singers appeared in Rio De Janeiro and the Greek diva’s Tosca was booed. Callas accused Tebaldi of organising a cabal against her. When Tebaldi's first Milan appearance in La Traviata failed to impress audiences, Callas told the press, “Poor thing, I feel so sorry for her.” Privately, Tebaldi commented, “Callas is flamboyant and thrives on this sort of thing. I am not, and I don't feel any need of this. I can stand on my accomplishments. I have my public and she has hers. There is enough space for both of us – to each her own.”
Fuelled by an insatiable press, the ‘feud’ hit a low point in 1956 when a Time magazine cover story compared Callas’ vocalism to champagne and Tebaldi’s to Coca-Cola. Callas added that Tebaldi “has no spine”, provoking a letter to the editor from Tebaldi: “She says I have no spine, but I have one thing she will never have – a heart.”
Much later, in 1968, when Tebaldi sang a Met opening-night Adriana Lecouvreur, Callas, who’d stopped singing at the house, visited her backstage after the performance. A photo taken at the time, skilfully arranged by Rudolf Bing, shows the two women embracing warmly – all smiles.
Almost as well-recognised for her dramatic "updos" [see my previous post about La Tebaldi for much more on that subject] and exquisite fashions, it's no surprise that a musuem has been established in Tebaldi's honour - in the same elegant villa outside Pisa as the National Museum of Giuseppe Verdi! Quite an accolade.
Let's celebrate La nostra Tebaldi with just a few examples of her genius:
Glorious.
Renata Ersilia Clotilde Tebaldi (1st February 1922 - 19th December 2004)
Friday, 4 February 2022
Thursday, 3 February 2022
The name's Blaise...
RIP Modesty Blaise aka Monica Vitti (born Maria Luisa Ceciarelli, 3rd November 1931 – 2nd February 2022).
Yet another spark of brightness departs for Fabulon, and the world is that much duller for it...
Wednesday, 2 February 2022
The Godfather of Homoerotic Photography
From Aperture photography magazine on the occasion of a major retrospective of the man's work at the Museum of Sex in New York back in 2019 (opening with a quote from the exhibition's curator Lissa Rivera):
“The big boom of porn culture wasn’t his style. It wasn’t elaborate. It wasn’t something that was going to take seven years to shoot and have jewels.”Pink Narcissus was, as they say, just too much. Producers wrenched the film from him and made a lousy 1971 print Bidgood took his name off. Meanwhile, audiences lapped up Warhol’s faux verité and the hedonism of Wakefield Poole...
The bud of Pink Narcissus would bloom in the work of Pierre et Gilles and David LaChapelle and Ryan Trecartin and Greer; its gauzy shimmer shines in films like Blade Runner and Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Exotic Video Show and Prince’s Sign o’ the Times... While drag queens have for decades mined his work for their art, it must also be noted the exclusive focus on male bodies in racialized fantasias would likely get the film “cancelled” today.
But the ripples of Bidgood’s influence appear in most every artsy earnest queer on Instagram who gazed into Bidgood’s pool and saw themselves. And what remains is a wide-eyed, world-building tribute to the beauty of narcissism. “He wasn’t being ironic,” says Rivera. “He was interested in the fantasies he had since he was a boy. He’s elevating men who don’t get elevated: queer men, hustlers, people from the drag world. He loved them in this emotional visual sense. He still loves that way.”
RIP James Bidgood (28th March 1933 – 31st January 2022)
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