Les Demi-Deux: Danny Fitzgerald, Richard Bennett, and the beauty of the male form

 

In the days before Stonewall, when gay erotica was usually closeted under the guise of fitness magazines, you may have come across Demi-Gods, published by the Demi-Deux studio.  A French import?  Exotic, seductive, and maybe more legal than the American variety.

The Demi-Deux promoted the beauty of the male form itself. You don't have to pretend that you're looking for muscle-building tips.  It's ok to gaze in awe.

You may have been surprised to discover that the Demi-Deux was not a French studio.  It was the work of Danny Fitzgerald, who lived in his parents' house in Carol Gardens, Brooklyn, and his model and collaborator, Richard Bennett.

Born in 1920, Danny Fitzgerald photographed scenes of everyday life during World War II and the 1950s. Some of the subjects had their shirts off, adding masculine beauty to the scene.

 

In 1958, Scranton, Pennsylvania native Richard Bennett moved to New York to become an actor/model. He sent his portfolio to Danny Fitzgerald, who invited him to do a photo shoot.  The two became lovers, and stayed together until Danny's death in 2000.

It was a new world.  Allen Ginsberg described gay sex acts in "Howl," 1956.   Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms, 1958, featured a gay teenager. Why not publish photos for an audience of open, out gay men?

Calling their studio Les Demi Deux, they published erotic photos in many of the gay-closeted physique magazines of the era, such as Physique Pictorial, The Young Physique, and Muscles A Go-Go, and, beginning in 1963, nude photos in their own Demi Gods.

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Joe Canoli's canoli: frontal nudity and erotic promise from the groovy 1960s

Readers were asking about Joe Canoli, one of the random hunks in the Season 2 Gemstone Memes. 

Walter Kudzincz, born in 1925, began photographing his well-hung buddies and boyfriends, establishing a catalog of guys in skimpy outfits pretending to be cowboys, pirates, or gladiators, trying to avoid being overtly homoerotic, as was required by the strict censorship and intense homophobia of 1950s society.    You could get them via mail order, or in "fitness" magazines like Physique Pictorial and Tomorrow's Man.  

In 1952 Walt met Jim Stryker, an 18-year old recent high school graduate, pranking his friend by urinating on him from a tree branch.  Stryker became his friend, lover, and the top-selling model in the gay male subculture for the next ten years.

In 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that male nudity was not necessarily obscene, and in 1965, magazines began printing frontal nudity, allowing Walt to challenge the "chaste," closeted gay models of the earlier generation.  It was the era of the psychedelics revolution, the sexual revolution, the youth counterculture, and the more open, out gay subcultures that would culminate in Stonewall and the Gay Rights Movement.  The modern gay man was willing to admit that he liked to look at cocks as well as muscles.

So Walt's Champion Studio models got naked.  Sometimes their photos were campy and cool, brightly colored, "mod," groovy.  Sometimes they made fun of the posing-strap cowboys and football players of the uptight 1950s.  Sometimes they were unabashedly erotic.  

I'm covering a lot about the life of Walt Kudzincz because I have found almost nothing about Joe Canoli.  This  is the earliest photo I could find, taken between 1962 , when rear nudity was permitted, and 1965, when you were allowed to go frontal. 

More after the break