GLR March-April 2023

“nearly two hours on a balcony watching 7 types [French slang for “guys”] jouir [to fuck] in 7 different manners from an old hairy pale-kneed grandfather down to the young Chicago sport who had stage fright.” Francis Millet, though he married a woman (with Mark Twain as his best man) and was the father of four children, maintained long-term relationships with men, the most signif icant being with U.S. Army officer Archibald Butt (nearly twenty years his junior). The couple shared a mansion in Wash ington, D.C., where they often hosted large parties attended by the capital’s elite. After a visit to Europe, Millet and Butt were traveling back to America on the Titanic when it sank, and both men perished. The Butt-Millet Memorial Fountain in Presi dent’s Park near the White House was dedicated to the couple in 1913. Few of the men who sported with the Sewer Club at The Benedick apartments were entirely homosexual. Many, like White himself, were husbands and fathers who also sought sex ual encounters with both men and women. (White would be shot and killed in 1906 by the jealous husband of the actress Evelyn Nesbit.) Labels are subjective at best, but it would perhaps be most accurate to describe them as “bohemians,” men with artis tic temperaments who held that sexual pleasures should not be hemmed in by the artificial guardrails of gender. There are no traces of mauve-tinged fin de siècle deca dence to be seen among the members of the Sewer Club—no mannered posing, no drooping ennui. Instead we find only a rambunctious, joyful refusal to live by society’s conventions. These men often needed to scrounge to pay the rent, or found themselves suddenly flush and just as suddenly over their heads in debt, but there was always someone able to throw a champagne party at Delmonico’s. They married for financial security or social respectability—often to women who had no more interest in a traditional union than they did and who wel comed the smokescreen. So they cheated on their wives with their boyfriends and cheated on their boyfriends with chorus girls. New York would not see such an unabashed celebration of pansexual hedonism again for nearly a century. The mem bers of the Sewer Club and their guests were free spirits with extraordinary talent who produced some of the most sublime architecture and decorative art that the country has ever seen. They were a guild of skilled craftsmen bound together by a complex web of affections, and they used a bachelor apart ment in The Benedick as their own private backroom cum frat house. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner labeled this period of our history the Gilded Age. For a few fortunate men over a few golden decades, NewYork City’s bachelor apartment build ings provided a safe private space for sexual nonconformists to glitter and be gay. R EFERENCES Baker, Paul R. Stanny: The Gilded Life of Stanford White . The Free Press, 1989. Broderick, Mosette. Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Archi tecture, Scandal and Class in America’s Gilded Age . Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Hinman, Suzanne. The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scan dal, and Architecture in Gilded Age New York . Syracuse University Press, 2019. March–April 2023

BOOK 1-NARRATIVE Soft cover, 360 pp. 8.5” x 11.0” 740 illustrations.

BOOK 2-GALLERY Soft cover, 368 pp. 8.5” x 11.0” 938 Illustrations

These heavily illustrated companion volumes are the first-person account of the 50-year professional career of Fred Bisonnes (aka Dennis Forbes, 1940 - present) as a photographer, graphic designer, illustrator, editor, art director, journalist and fiction writer, who during the period from 1974 to 1989 was a major figure in publishing activities of the Gay Liberation Movement, art directing for Vector monthly and The Advocate biweekly magazines, as well as for Falcon and Western Man studios, plus single-handedly creating Advocate MEN magazine. His b&w and color nude-beefcake photography was groundbreaking; and his caricatures and montage illustrations were widely published. Bisonnes is bluntly candid in his tell-all recounting of the colorful personalities and sometimes-bizarre circumstances with whom and in which he worked. These volumes stand as definitive records of a little-known period in American journalism. Book 1- Narrative is heavily illustrated and Book 2-Gallery includes scores of images that wouldn’t fit in Book 1, which are accompanied by minimal text.

Reader Alert: Both volumes contain

Published by Dancing Faun Books, available exclusively from AMAZON.COM

copious amounts of frontal male nudity.

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