Gods among us: Male beauty and ‘Dieux du Stade’

February 17, 2016

What would Abigail Solomon-Godeau make of “Dieux du Stade,” the new book by photographer Fred Goudon, inspired by the “Dieux du Stade” calendars featuring members of the Stade Français Paris rugby club and athletes from other disciplines?

In her 1997 book “Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation” (Thames and Hudson), the feminist art historian suggests that the nude male has been the primary sex symbol throughout art history, reaching an apotheosis in Neoclassical (turn-of-the-19th-century) Paris in the work of such artists as David, Ingres and especially Girodet, who often portrayed their subjects in the languid pose of women offered up for the male gaze. ...

Sail away, sail away, sail away – ‘The Stylish Life: Yachting”

July 7, 2015

In my debut novel “Water Music,” the four gay athletes at its core explore their relationships during a vacation on Mykonos, the home of tennis player Alex Vyranos.

Alex is the son of a man who has made a fortune working for an Onassis-style shipping tycoon. At one point, Spyros Vyranos lends his son a company yacht, the Semiramide, to pilot his three friends to the neighboring isle of Delos, birthplace of Apollo. Spyros has warned Alex that the Semiramide is not a toy. He doesn’t want him drinking and sailing He doesn’t want the four winding up on TMZ.

Of course not, papa, Alex remembers telling him as he takes a swig of Dom Perignon at the wheel of the Semiramide, feeling all the power, freedom and escape that a yacht has to offer. ...

Tennis, everyone

June 26, 2015

Just in time for Wimbledon (June 29 through July 12), teNeues offers “The Stylish Life: Tennis,” a new coffee table book that ranges over the art, fashion and personalities of the modern game that began in the late 19th century. It’s a book that had me at the back cover.

The photograph (also reproduced opposite the Table of Contents) depicts the green tennis courts of Italy’s Il San Pietro di Positano resort spilling onto the jagged, pristine blue Amalfi Coast. That photograph and the reproduction of a Roger Broders poster circa 1930, with its clay courts tumbling onto a periwinkle Mediterranean Sea in Monte Carlo, are precisely what I imagined in “Water Music,” my debut novel, when my athlete-heroes vacation on the island of Mykonos. ...