George Platt Lynes

Abstract

Abstract This is a biography of George Platt Lynes (1907–1955), the gregarious American portrait, dance, fashion, and male nude photographer whose career spanned the late 1920s through his early death. From age eighteen, Lynes entered the cosmopolitan world of the American expatriate community in Paris when he became acquainted with the salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Intending to pursue a writing and small-press publishing career, Lynes also began photographing authors like Stein, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Colette. Soon, he turned exclusively to photography, establishing himself as one of the premier fashion photographers in the Condé Nast stable, documenting the ballet companies of George Balanchine/Lincoln Kirstein, and pursuing a private obsession with seductive images of young male nudes rarely published in his lifetime. Lynes’s personal life was as glamorous and theatrical as his images with their brilliant studio lighting and dramatic Surrealist setups. Barely out of his teens, he met publisher Monroe Wheeler, who was already in a relationship with emerging expatriate novelist Glenway Wescott. The peripatetic threesome maintained a polyamorous connection that lasted some fifteen years. Their New York apartment became a mecca for elegant name-dropping dinner parties. Their ménage-a-trois complicates our understanding of the pre-Stonewall gay “closet.” This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes’s life by his brother, the writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians across cultural genres that defined transatlantic cosmopolitan culture and presaged later gay political consciousness.