Creative Capital

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A delicate Pan sits in a tree above a leafy, Technicolor paradise, lifting his pipes to his sensual lips. Nearby, a pompadour Cupid swings from a boudoir-pink heart, as a blond, bare-chested hunk leans against a lamppost near the Eiffel Tower. These deliberate confections, derived from 1940s and ’50s Hollywood musicals, could only be the work of one person: James Bidgood, a 72-year-old cult figure known today as “the father of gay pulp.”

Bidgood is actually an unsung pioneer of what’s now called set-up photography—staged images presented as scenes from life—and has made a career of creating visual odes to beautiful young men acting out in Baroque splendor. “I’ve always been dramatic and played ‘show,’” says the Wisconsin-born New Yorker, who also goes by the name Les Folles des Hommes. “I’m very into sequins.”

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1982 film, Querelle, clearly borrows from the Bidgood image bank, though Fassbinder never had to face the sort of indignation and hostility that greeted Bidgood’s early forays into homoerotic fantasy. In the 1950s, when the self-taught photographer picked up a camera, the pursuit of homosexual desire in art was strictly taboo.

Back then, to eroticize the male body as boldly as he did was to be seen as a pornographer. Galleries turned him away. His only recourse was to publish his pictures in bodybuilding magazines, where his extravagant sets and lighting—all built and shot in his cramped Hell’s Kitchen apartment—didn’t really belong. “Too frou-frou,” he says. “But I didn’t see why you couldn’t treat a beautiful boy the way Hollywood did a beautiful woman.”

It wasn’t long before he took the plunge into moviemaking himself with Pink Narcissus, an 8mm silent film that took six years to complete. Released in 1971, its feature-length dream sequence is more titillating to the eye than sexually arousing. Rediscovered only recently and made available on DVD, it joins Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising as an important cultural marker of its time, celebrated not just by gay viewers but also contemporary artists. The collaborative team of Pierre et Gilles and the photographer David LaChapelle, for example, clearly owe Bidgood an aesthetic debt.

Yet Bidgood’s own agenda has never been purely aesthetic. Nowhere is that plainer than in Bidgood-Blair’s Great American Traveling Midway Shows, the series of photographs that has drawn the support of Creative Capital. “These are more political,” Bidgood says. “A world of wonders! Shocking hypocrisies and incredible inequities: an assemblage of sideshow attractions,” meaning that the new works are more explicit than any he has done before, and address a wider audience.

Audiences should prepare themselves for scabrous, elaborately produced digital images examining what Bidgood believes are unhealthy attitudes toward race, sex, and religion. Viewers will also want to bring a sense of humor.

In one scene, a butcher in a straw boater strolls through a street fair with a sausage-like cigar, while a priest considers merchandise that includes artificial anuses. Another image features an overgrown baby in a prison-like crib, who is, in Bidgood’s words, “abusing himself” with his toys (enormous dildos), as his doting family looks on.

With the computer furnished by his Creative Capital grant, Bidgood has been preparing a selection of his classic photographs for exhibition at ClampArt, his New York gallery. With his work in demand, sales should help spur production for Bidgood-Blair’s Great American Traveling Midway Shows, currently slated for fall 2006. But matching funds are still needed.

Life is not always kind to those as unafraid to plumb the farther reaches of imagination as James Bidgood. “If only I’d been ordinary,” he says. “I’d have cried fewer tears.” But tears are only part of the story. If art doesn’t rule the world, it does affect the way we see the world, and Bidgood is determined to make it appear in rapturous, singing and dancing color.

Download the Weekend Workshop Agenda (.pdf)