James Bidgood‘s artistic output embraced a number of media and disciplines, including music, set and window design, and drag performance He left his hometown and established himself in a tiny apartment in Manhattan, New York City, that he called “Les Folies des Hommes.” He performed in drag shows and as a male dancer in nightclubs, namely the infamous Club 82. He graduated from the Parsons School of design and worked professionally as a window-dresser, costume designer and freelance photographer.
From 1963 to 1967, his photos were published in a range of Physique magazines, namely The Young Physique, Muscleboy, Demi-Gods, and Muscle Teens. He did two short films for the Carpezio shoe company, to advertise their models. He met Robert as a photo model, named him Bobby Kendall and actually lived with him during most part of the filming of Pink Narcissus (1971), from 1964 to 1969.
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The film was extremely popular on the underground film scene, but due to differences with a producer, Bidgood had his name removed from it. The director was listed as “Anonymous” and for many years was believed to be Andy Warhol.
Thankfully Pink Narcissus was restored and re-released by Strand Releasing in 1999, and Bidgood and the film began to receive recognition for its iconic status in the history of queer cinema,
1999 also saw the release of a book of Bidgood’s erotic and highly stylized. photography, titled simply Bidgood, with text by Bruce Benderson. “I wanted to photograph naked young men as opulently and as attentively as those professional ladies appearing in Playboy-type magazines were photographed,” Bidgood told Another Man. His models’ genitals were hidden, often draped in filmy fabric, to skirt laws against depictions of full-frontal nudity.
His fame came late in life with exhibitions of his photography at galleries and New York’s Museum of Sex.
JAMES BIDGOOD March 28, 1933- January 31, 2022 (aged 88) R.I.P
A GoFundMe campaign has been set up to cover funeral and burial expenses. His burial site at Cedar Park Cemetery
in Hudson, N.Y., will be a place “where admirers can come for years to remember both the artist and the man”
executor Kelly McKaig wrote on GoFund Me.
Labels: 2022, iconic artist, James Bidgood, Pink Narcissus
