Gay Thursday: Romance over 6 decades

Harold Eliot Leeds and Wheaton Galentine
The house where Carrie Bradshaw lived, supposedly on the Upper East Side but actually at 66 Perry Street in the West Village, still draws a steady stream of "Sex and the City" fans. They snap photos of the row house, which was built in 1866, as if to partake in the fictional life of a New York writer and the foibles of her quest for lasting romance.

But a real New York romance played out at the house next door, No. 64, whose plainer facade served as Carrie’s building for the first three seasons of the show, said Tim Gunn, the fashion executive who lived in an apartment there for 16 years. It lasted almost six decades, linking two men from their first meeting at the Rockefeller Center skating rink during World War II until one of them, Harold Eliot Leeds, an architect and professor of interior design at Pratt, died in 2002.

Read the full story at The New York Times

This brings to an end the vintage series that began in October 2010. On the second post of the series, I explained: "For the next while - until I run out of photos - Gay Thursdays is going to have a vintage look. It will be mainly couples (often with a military flavour), but not always. Sometimes the photos will not be the best quality, but I think they are still worth seeing. Are the men gay? There is no way to tell, but each photo expresses an affection that we all, gay and straight, should be unafraid to learn from. Each photo has a story known only to the men in it, but I'm sure you can imagine your own."

As it turned out it wasn't just photos, but some articles, including one on the male prostitutes of 1890's New York, and samples of some gay photographers' work: Gedney, Glover and Lynes. Hopefully the series provided not only a look at the affection between men but also a glimpse into life before Stonewall and gay liberation.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

POZ - POZ Army

Sunday Songs: Abbey Lincoln