George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (and the Daring Life)

This PowerPoint presentation and interview will examine the fascinating life and work of the gay photographer George Platt Lynes, who grew up in New Jersey and the Berkshires but became a transatlantic cosmopolitan with a wide network of queer friends—artists, writers, and performers. After befriending Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas when he went to Paris at age eighteen in 1925, Lynes eventually took up photography in NYC. His highly theatrical studio work in portraiture, fashion, classical dance, mythological subjects, and especially the male nude, were influenced by Surrealism. For nearly fifteen years he shared his life with Monroe Wheeler, a publisher who became a prominent behind-the-scenes figure at the Museum of Modern Art, and the novelist Glenway Wescott, who lived with Wheeler in France in the 1920s and became a member of the influential literary Lost Generation. Their threesome was at the nexus of intersecting queer cultural circles and included such artists as Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French (PaJaMa), fiction writer Katherine Anne Porter, impresario Lincoln Kirstein, and the painter and illustrator Bernard Perlin. Lynes-Wheeler-Wescott aided Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research, and the Institute’s collection of Lynes’s male nudes preserves images almost never exhibited and rarely published in Lynes’s lifetime.

Safety protocol:

In an effort to prevent the spread of COVID-19, we are limiting the number of in-person attendees to 30. Registration on this page is required in order to attend.

If you have any symptoms associated with COVID-19 in the days leading up to the event, we ask you to please cancel your reservation so that others can attend. If all 30 reservations have been claimed and you would like to be placed on a wait list, please write to us at [email protected].

Please note that masks are required at all times inside The LGBT Community Center, where the Bureau is located.

Suggested donation of $10 to benefit the Bureau's work. We will pass a bag at the start of the event. But you are more than welcome to make a donation here when you register. Thank you for supporting the Bureau's work!

All are welcome to join, with or without a donation.

(Oxford University Press, hardcover) from the Bureau at a 20% discount: $36 (marked down from $45)! Release date is November 9, 2021--shipments to go out as soon as we have copies in hand.

We hope to have copies in hand by November 12th, but we cannot guarantee that they will arrive on time for the event. We will update this page as soon as we have a confirmed date of arrival.

Thank you for supporting the Bureau by purchasing books from us!

Allen Ellenzweig is a cultural critic and commentator who has published in numerous arts and general interest periodicals, including The Village Voice and Art in America, as well as the online journals Tablet, The Forward, and Poetry Magazine. His landmark history, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe, was published in 1992. He is a regular contributor to the Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide and teaches in the Writing Program of Rutgers University.

Event Venue

Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, 208 West 13th Street, New York, United States