David Leddick's book Gorgeous Gallery combines popular sexual art with fine art, compiling examples of the homoerotic works of 47 artists of the 20th and 21st centuries in color reproductions. Leddick is a noted gay art chronicler, novelist and actor.
Windy City Times: What distinguishes popular art from fine art, and which is it that we have here?
David Leddick: It's really only the last couple centuries that we've made this big difference in our minds between what is the one and what is the other. Besides, I think a lot of what we consider fine art from the past is homoerotic.
But I think fine art can be sexy. And I think a lot of what we consider popular art—and even pornography—can be fine art. … There's something really beautiful about this work that is kind of exciting to look at, and it can also be sexually exciting. And those two things can exist in the same art piece.
WCT: Describe the three periods—classics, contemporary and avant-garde—that the book covers. What distinguishes each period?
David Leddick: The Classics is really from 1920 on. Classics, for the most part, are artists that are dead. … They were people that, in their time period, a lot of their work was very undercover. They only gave it to friends, never published in a book, ever. A lot of this material from this section came from [the] Leslie Lohman [Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art] because these [pieces] were in personal collections. People would buy the drawings or buy the paintings. There wasn't much available.
WCT: Moving onto contemporary, how do you classify that period?
David Leddick: They're people that have gallery shows and books have been done on them; they have a clientele, they're well-known as fine artists. We have in that group Andy Warhol, David Hockney—people who are very major names. Also, it's interesting. A couple people in this section are under assumed names because they're quite well-known as landscape painters and they said, "I really can't come out as an artist of the male nude or I'd lose my landscape painting clientele probably." …
The avant-garde, for me, means ahead of the general trend. The [artists] are much younger. It's really sexy, but not in a way I would ever even think of.
Part of it has to do with their mind set, the way they look at it. They're abstract and sexual at the same time.
I think one of the most interesting is a guy named John Parot because he combines photography and graphic art in a very abstract way. You think, "Where do his ideas come from?" Very sexy—but then suddenly you realize that it's not so sexy because he's really looking at the visual material as elements of a design and it kind of takes the whole sexual quality out of it.
WCT: How do you define sexy?
David Leddick: Well, if you see a big close-up of somebody masturbating, [then] I think a lot of gay men would see as being very sexy. And then he [Parot] includes a kind of drawing of an abstract face right in the crotch. And you think, "Wait a minute. This face has nothing to do with this at all." It's very jarring, very unexpected. I'm always so interested in where it comes from in the artist's mind.
WCT: Which of the three periods is your favorite, and why?
David Leddick: Contemporary. I have several portraits by Don Bachardy. I think Don Bachardy is very underrated. I think he is a very important artist He's not working from a photograph. He's really looking at you, and he works very quickly and really captures...
WCT: Other art books have focused on male erotic art. Whose concept was Gorgeous Gallery, and how did you think of it as different from the other books?
David Leddick: Gorgeous Gallery was really a Bruno Gmunder [publisher] concept because I had done a number of forewords for them for other people's art books. I think there's never really been a book like this before because this is going a whole lot further sexually than any previous book that anybody's done.
WCT: So the objective with this book was to…?
David Leddick: To take the mixture of sexuality and fine art as far as we could.
WCT: What was the biggest challenge?
David Leddick: Maybe overriding my own prudery. Sometimes I said, "Wait a minute, David. Is some of this maybe too extreme?" And I'd say, "No, it's not too extreme." It's fine art, it's something other people might call porn, but you have to be true to your own judgment. … You can't weasel out of stuff. You've got to stand by it.
WCT: What's an example of one picture where you initially thought you were too prudish about?
David Leddick: There are some great pictures by Paul Cadmus, The Kinsey Institute. They are really out there. Also, I want to tell you my favorite artist is Michael Leonard. He's such a good artist. …They're very sexy and they're all portraits, very nude portraits, very original. You haven't seen it before. I think he's superb.
WCT: What did you learn during the process of putting this book together that surprised you?
David Leddick: How quickly within my lifetime we've gone from where we didn't even know what gay was, to thinking being gay was terrible, to being interested when one of the major television personalities announces he's gay and nobody even cares. In 80 years, that's a very fast social development, I think.
WCT: What's next for you?
David Leddick: The next big book we're pushing is all done and ready to go, and it's called How to Hit 70 Doing a Hundred. That's kind of a combination picture book thing—anybody that's in their 60s? We can all easily live into our 90s. Are we going to sit about for 30 years? This could be the best part of your life. I tell everybody, you can never ruin your reputation after 70.
Gorgeous Gallery, by David Leddick, retails for $52.99.
