For forty years they lived and worked together in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn — a gay photographer and his model, muse, and life partner — making images of such quiet power that critics would later compare them to Mapplethorpe, and wonder how the world had never heard of either of them.
There is a particular photograph that tells you everything about Danny Fitzgerald’s relationship to his subjects. A young man sits on the steps of a Carroll Gardens brownstone, shirtless in chinos, half-squinting into the afternoon sun. He is not posed in the theatrical sense, not arranged against Greek columns or draped in a posing strap in the manner of the physique studios that defined his era. He is simply present, on his own street, in his own skin, caught in a moment of unguarded ease. And the image is charged with such careful attention, such evident love for the person being photographed, that a viewer fifty years later cannot look at it without wondering about the man behind the camera and what exactly he felt for the men in front of it.
Fitzgerald was a man of his time, a gay man in a country where being gay was a criminal offence, living in a working-class Italian-American neighbourhood where silence was survival, making photographs that spoke plainly to anyone who knew how to look at them and said nothing at all to everyone else. His work was forgotten almost entirely for four decades after he stopped making it. When it was finally rediscovered and brought to light — by two collectors who stumbled across a handful of prints at auction in the early 2000s and spent more than a decade tracking down the rest — the critical response was not polite. It was astonished.
Danny Fitzgerald, working under the studio name Les Demi Dieux from a terraced house in Brooklyn, had pioneered a style of male nude photography that Bruce Weber and Robert Mapplethorpe would make famous twenty years after he put his camera away. He had done it in a language of restraint, tenderness, and formal rigour, with almost no money, no gallery representation, no critical attention, and no public identity. And he had done it, throughout, with the help of a man named Richard Bennett, who was his model, his creative partner, and — for forty years, until Fitzgerald’s death in 2000 — the person he called, when pressed for a word, “a friend, in the Greek sense.”
Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn: The World He Came From
Danny Fitzgerald was born in 1921 in Carroll Gardens, a working-class neighbourhood in Brooklyn settled largely by first- and second-generation Italian immigrants, where the streets were full of young men in T-shirts and the social currency was toughness, loyalty, and an acute sensitivity to what the neighbours might think. His parents were first-generation Italian-Irish. He grew up in a world of stoop culture, street gangs, and the particular masculine codes of a mid-century urban neighbourhood that had not yet been touched by the later histories of gentrification or social liberalisation.
That world, in retrospect, is one of the subjects of his art. The boys and young men Fitzgerald photographed from the late 1950s onwards were, to a large extent, his own neighbours — the actual youth of Carroll Gardens, photographed on stoops, basketball courts, street corners, and the interiors of the family home that doubled as his makeshift studio. Before he began making physique photographs in the formal sense, he was already doing something closer to documentary portraiture: images of young men in the last years of the greaser era, shot with the compositional instincts of a filmmaker and the intimacy of someone who had grown up in the same streets.
The photographic influences he absorbed were not the beefcake catalogues that dominated male nude photography in the 1950s. They were Robert Frank and Alfred Stieglitz, whose images were deeply tied to place and the visual grammar of New York. They were Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, whose portraits engage their subjects with an arresting directness. They were the filmmakers Leni Riefenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein, whose compositions tilted off-centre with a cinematographic unease. And they were, crucially, the earlier gay master George Platt Lynes — whose male nudes from the 1930s and 1940s embodied, as the Steven Kasher Gallery would later write, “an intimacy unequalled in their time” and whose “technical mastery and restrained sensuality” became a visible influence on Fitzgerald’s developing aesthetic, though without Lynes’s theatrical staging (The Eye of Photography, 2019).
What this combination produced was a sensibility that sat almost nowhere in the taxonomy of its moment. It was not quite physique photography in the commercial sense. It was not fine art in the institutional sense. It was not documentary in the journalistic sense. It was something across all three — a personal, affectionate, formally sophisticated record of the male body in working-class New York, made by a gay man who could not say what it was or why he was making it, but could not seem to stop.
The Context: A World of Coded Images and Criminal Risk
Danny Fitzgerald, Three Boys, circa 1960s, Private Collection
To understand what Fitzgerald was doing and the risks it carried, it is necessary to spend a moment with the wider history of physique photography in mid-century America — a history that is itself one of the most revealing chapters in LGBTQ+ cultural history.
Until the late 1960s, homosexual acts between consenting adults were criminal offences across every state in the United States. The production and distribution of homoerotic material was treated as obscenity, subject to postal censorship and police prosecution. And yet, a flourishing underground visual culture of male nude photography existed throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s — operating through the legal fiction that photographs of muscular, near-naked young men were about physical fitness rather than desire.
The central figure in this history is Bob Mizer, who founded the Athletic Model Guild in Los Angeles in December 1945 (Wikipedia, Athletic Model Guild). Mizer began photographing men he recruited from local gyms and beaches and built a mail-order business selling photosets and, from 1951, a magazine called Physique Pictorial — America’s first publication that was, as one historian put it, “indisputably aimed at a gay audience.” His models wore posing straps — the minimum covering the law would accept — arranged against Greek columns and Roman headdresses that provided a fig leaf of classical legitimacy. Both AMG and Mizer faced repeated obscenity charges. He never fully backed down.
Around Mizer, and in dialogue with his operation, grew a network of similar studios across America. Each photographer worked under a pseudonym: Don Whitman as the Western Photography Guild, Bruce Bellas as “Bruce of Los Angeles,” Douglas Juleff as “Douglas of Detroit.” The pseudonyms served a double purpose — they protected photographers from the personal legal exposure that Mizer regularly faced, and they created the illusion of institutional distance, as if the images were the product of a professional collective rather than a specific gay man’s desire.
It was into this context that Danny Fitzgerald and Richard Bennett began operating under the name Les Demi Dieux — “the demi-gods” — in the early 1960s. The name was not incidental. It was both a declaration and a shelter: a declaration, because naming your subjects demi-gods was an act of reverence that went far beyond the language of muscle magazines; a shelter, because a French studio name attached to a Brooklyn mailing address made the photographer harder to locate, prosecute, or shame.
Richard Bennett: The Man Who Came Looking
The story of how Richard Bennett found Danny Fitzgerald is one of those small historical facts that resonates louder in retrospect than it could have at the time.
Bennett came to New York from working-class Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the early 1960s, looking for acting and modelling work. He was, by all accounts, a striking physical presence — what the monograph’s biographical notes describe as “a chiselled, masculine beauty with the natural ability of a classic artistic poser.” But what distinguishes his arrival in the Fitzgerald story is that he was not passively discovered. He pursued the photographer deliberately, submitting his résumé through an enthusiast in the Bronx who was familiar with Fitzgerald’s aesthetic. He saw something in the work and wanted to be part of it.
His memory of his first encounter with Fitzgerald, quoted in Brooklyn Boys, captures something of what that encounter offered: “Danny was mesmerising. He could talk about anything — art, literature, opera, film — and people really listened to him.” This is the portrait of a man whose intellectual world was as much a draw as his visual world: someone who moved through the working-class Brooklyn of his birth with a private inner life that most of his neighbours probably never glimpsed and certainly never asked about. For Bennett, arriving from Scranton with ambitions and no particular map for how to realise them, Fitzgerald represented access to exactly that kind of interior life, one that knew art and beauty and had a language for them.
The transition from model to partner — in the creative sense and, it seems clear, in the fuller sense — was rapid. “In no time,” the Brooklyn Boys monograph records, “Bennett moved into Fitzgerald’s home and they began to shoot photographs everywhere together.” Over the following years they took the camera from the makeshift studio on the second floor of their Carroll Gardens house to the beaches of New Jersey, to the woods of western Pennsylvania, to urban locations across New York. The photographs made in this period are Fitzgerald’s finest work, and Bennett is their recurring centre of gravity.
The Partnership: Art, Love, and the Language of 1960s Silence
The question of what Danny Fitzgerald and Richard Bennett were to each other is one that the surviving record handles with careful, instructive ambiguity. When Bennett is asked today — he attended the 2013 book launch and exhibition at the Steven Kasher Gallery and signed copies alongside the collectors who produced the monograph — whether he and Fitzgerald were “lovers” or “partners,” he gives an answer that is, in its way, both completely accurate and deliberately unanswerable.
“We were friends,” he says, “in the Greek sense of the word.”
The Greek sense. The answer is a small masterpiece of gay self-presentation across the decades. It invokes classical friendship, the model of devoted male companionship that the ancient world celebrated and that Western culture had used for centuries as a respectable cover for what lay beneath it. It leaves interpretation entirely to the receiver. It is the answer of a man formed in a time when directness was dangerous, who has lived long enough to see directness become possible, but who remains, in his own way, faithful to the language that kept him and Fitzgerald safe.
The Brooklyn Boys monograph is explicit about the historical context that shaped this language: “Again, it is important to remember that this was the early 1960s and homosexuality was illegal, banished to speakeasies, covered up, or so repressed that even men like Fitzgerald may not have admitted it — even to themselves — and certainly would not have spoken of it openly or flaunted it publicly. Like many artists of the time, Fitzgerald sublimated his sexual energy into the process of making his art, keeping proper distance between himself and his model, and charging the images with all the power and longing of the feelings he pressed down into the work.” (lesdemidieux.com)
This description of sublimation — of desire converted into formal attention, channelled through the act of making rather than the act of stating — is one of the most important things to understand about the Les Demi Dieux photographs. They are not directly erotic images in the manner of the racier physique publications of the period. They are something subtler and, in the end, more powerful: images saturated with the specific quality of attention that comes from loving what you are looking at. The technical mastery — the light, the composition, the relationship between the figure and the space around it — is inseparable from the emotional investment. Fitzgerald photographed Bennett, and the other men of Carroll Gardens and the New Jersey beaches, as if they were precious. Because, evidently, they were.
Bennett’s role in the creative process was not passive. As his work with Fitzgerald deepened, the photographs changed. What had been good became exceptional. The Brooklyn Boys monograph records that “as Bennett became Fitzgerald’s primary model, his work changed quickly and dramatically, incorporating the visual drama of modernist photographers and filmmakers, and breaking from the clichés of the ‘beefcake’ photography of the previous decade.” Bennett was not merely a body in front of a camera. He was a creative intelligence, someone whose natural sense of how to inhabit space — described as “the natural ability of a classic artistic poser” — gave Fitzgerald a collaborator rather than simply a subject. The partnership produced something neither could have made alone.
The forty-year companionship that followed — through the photography, through the 1970s and 1980s, through the epidemic years, through Fitzgerald’s decline and death in 2000 — is documented only in fragments and in the images themselves. They were not a couple in any public sense that the period would have recognised. They were, in the only language available to them, friends. The depth of that friendship — and what it actually constituted — is something the photographs make clear without any need for statement.
The Photographs: What They Show and What They Mean
The work that Fitzgerald made under the Les Demi Dieux name between roughly 1958 and 1968 falls into several loosely overlapping categories, each of which represents a different dimension of his sensibility and his subjects.
The street portraits of Carroll Gardens youth — boys and young men photographed on stoops, against walls, on basketball courts — belong to a tradition of American social documentary but with an intimacy that sets them apart from it. These are not the images of an outside observer recording a neighbourhood he does not belong to. They are the images of someone photographing his own world with complete visual authority. The subjects are relaxed, self-possessed, undefensive. The atmosphere is one of mutual recognition. For a gay man in 1960s Brooklyn photographing the young men of his neighbourhood, the production of images this unguarded required a level of trust that is itself a kind of testimony.
The physique and nude photographs are where the influence of Lynes and the broader tradition of male nude art photography is most visible. In these images, Fitzgerald brings the compositional intelligence of a fine art photographer to subjects who might, in other hands, have become merely magazine material. Richard Bennett, as the primary model, is consistently photographed with a seriousness and formal care that treats him not as an object of display but as a subject worthy of the full range of the camera’s attention. The monograph published by Bruno Gmünder Verlag in Berlin in 2013 — Brooklyn Boys: Danny Fitzgerald and Les Demi Dieux, edited by BigKugels Photographic — documents this range: 160 pages of black-and-white and colour images that represent the first comprehensive presentation of the work since its original publication in physique magazines half a century earlier.
One Goodreads reviewer, writing with unusual precision, identifies the historical position of the photographs: “In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Danny Fitzgerald pioneered a style of physique photography that Bruce Weber and Mapplethorpe would popularise twenty years later. Fitzgerald broke away from the pin-up beefcake aesthetic of Mizer and Bruce of LA towards something more lyrical.” (Allbookstores.com review of Brooklyn Boys) This is accurate as far as it goes, and it goes a considerable distance. The specific comparison that the Les Demi Dieux website itself draws is to Mapplethorpe’s later juxtapositions of the male body with classical sculptural forms: “Bennett’s fleshy muscle is paired with the cold white marble torso of Eros or a long branch of lilies, more than a decade before Mapplethorpe would make similar visceral juxtapositions.” (lesdemidieux.com)
Robert Mapplethorpe made his name in the late 1970s and 1980s with precisely such juxtapositions — the male body against classical material, flesh against marble and flower, desire rendered in the formal language of art history. His work was celebrated, controversially, loudly, and internationally. He became one of the most discussed artists of the twentieth century. Fitzgerald, who had been doing something very similar twenty years earlier in a terraced house in Brooklyn, died in 2000 without a gallery exhibition to his name.
The comparison is worth dwelling on not to diminish Mapplethorpe but to locate Fitzgerald properly in the lineage from which both men drew. George Platt Lynes — whose male nudes from the 1930s through the early 1950s are now recognised as the foundational document of homoerotic art photography in America, the work without which, as the Eye of Photography puts it, “Mapplethorpe, Weber and Ritts are unthinkable” — was Fitzgerald’s direct predecessor and visible influence. Fitzgerald, in turn, appears to have been working in that tradition with greater formal purity and realism than most of his contemporaries, and with an emotional directness rooted in the specificity of place — Brooklyn, Carroll Gardens, these streets, these men — that gives the work a quality of documentary truth alongside its formal achievement.
Publication, Magazines, and the Public/Private Divide
For a brief period in the early 1960s, Les Demi Dieux photographs reached a public — albeit an audience that could not acknowledge, in most cases, the exact nature of its interest in them. Throughout that decade, Fitzgerald and Bennett’s images appeared regularly on the covers and pages of Joe Weider’s physique publications: The Young Physique, Muscles a Go-Go, Demi Gods, and Era, the publisher’s compilation volume celebrating the best photographers of the 1960s. (lesdemidieux.com)
Weider’s publications were the mainstream of the physique magazine world — slickly designed, widely distributed, ostensibly about bodybuilding and physical culture in the tradition that stretching back through the physical culture movements of the late nineteenth century. They were also, as any gay man who bought them at a newsstand in 1962 understood perfectly well, visual culture designed for and consumed by people who were interested in men’s bodies. The physique magazine was one of the primary media through which gay visual culture circulated in pre-Stonewall America, sold openly alongside mainstream magazines precisely because it maintained the fiction of its fitness credentials.
Within this context, Les Demi Dieux photographs stood out for the same reasons they would later astonish collectors who found them decades later: they were simply better made, more formally sophisticated, more attentive to their subjects than the standard physique magazine content. They lent Weider’s publications, as the monograph notes, “a visual impact and artistic quality that surpassed the average male physique magazines of the period.” The readership who saw them in the pages of Demi Gods or The Young Physique knew what they were looking at. The newsagent who sold the magazine to them did not need to.
After 1968, the photographs stopped appearing. The reasons for Fitzgerald’s decade-long and then apparently permanent withdrawal from the making and distribution of his work are not fully documented. What is clear is that the decade that followed — the 1969 Stonewall uprising, the emergence of gay liberation as an organised movement, the rapid transformation of the legal and social landscape of gay life in America — produced a world in which the careful coded language that the physique magazine had operated within became less necessary. The publication structures that had sustained photographers like Fitzgerald were simultaneously superseded and exposed by the liberalisation of obscenity law, the emergence of explicitly gay publications, and the cultural shift that followed Stonewall. The halfway house that physique photography had occupied — neither art nor pornography, neither openly gay nor fully closeted — ceased to have a clear market or cultural function.
Fitzgerald appears to have retreated into private life with Bennett, the camera put away, the photographs filed away in boxes. He died in 2000 with almost no public profile and no gallery exhibition.
Rediscovery: The Work Returns
The story of how the Les Demi Dieux archive was recovered is one of the odder chapters in the history of photography collecting.
In 2001, the collectors behind BigKugels Photographic came across a small number of Fitzgerald’s photographs at an auction, alongside some correspondence and physique magazines from the same period. The images were unusual enough — visually distinguished from the standard physique archive material in ways that were immediately apparent — to prompt a search for the photographer. That search led, eventually, to Richard Bennett, who was still alive and who held the remaining archive: all of Fitzgerald’s original negatives, proof sheets, and vintage prints, along with, as BigKugels would note in their monograph, the copyright to all of the work.
Bennett, by this point, was seeing images he and Fitzgerald had made together four decades earlier being treated as serious historical documents and potential art objects. The process of being rediscovered — being asked to remember, to explain, to put into words what the work had meant and what he and the photographer had been to each other — required a translation across fifty years of social change, legal change, and personal history that is itself one of the more remarkable aspects of the Les Demi Dieux story.
The first major exhibition of the work was mounted at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York in December 2013, running from December 12th to January 18th, 2014. It included 35 portraits and male nudes in both black and white and colour. Richard Bennett attended the opening and book signing in person — at which point, the photographer who had made the images was thirteen years dead, and the man who had been their primary subject was in his seventies, present in the gallery, standing in front of fifty-year-old photographs of his own young body, signing copies of the book that restored both his name and Fitzgerald’s to the record.
The first comprehensive monograph, Brooklyn Boys: Danny Fitzgerald and Les Demi Dieux, was published by Bruno Gmünder Verlag of Berlin in October 2013, written and edited by BigKugels Photographic. The 160-page volume was the first time the full scope of Fitzgerald’s work had been presented to any audience, institutional or popular. Its publication in Berlin, by a German publisher with a long history of presenting gay art and photography, before its US release, carries its own cultural commentary: the work found its institutional home in a European city rather than the American one that had produced it.
The Stevens Kasher Gallery subsequently exhibited the work at AIPAD — the Association of International Photography Art Dealers’ annual show at the Park Avenue Armory, one of the most prestigious photography events in the world — in April 2014. This placed Fitzgerald in the company of the recognised masters of twentieth-century photography in a formal institutional setting for the first time.
As the BigKugels team wrote at the time of publication, they had been “obsessed with and inspired by his modernist aesthetic, gorgeous compositions, natural and engaging subjects, and lost place in the history of American photography, New York City and the LGBT community.” (Swann Auction Galleries Photophilia blog, 2013) The phrase “lost place” is precise. This was not work that had been suppressed or destroyed. It had simply been stored in boxes, unexhibited, unpublished in any formal sense, invisible to the institutions that would have recognised its quality — because its maker was a gay man in Carroll Gardens who had no access to those institutions, and no safe way to present the full truth of what the images were about.
The LGBTQ+ Significance: What Was Lost and What Was Found
Danny Fitzgerald and Richard Bennett’s story sits within a much larger narrative of gay cultural production that was obscured, scattered, or simply never recorded during the decades when its existence was illegal. The physique photography tradition — Mizer, Bruce of Los Angeles, Don Whitman, Lon of New York, and the dozens of lesser-known photographers who contributed to the genre — represents one of the richest and most significant chapters in pre-Stonewall LGBTQ+ visual culture. It was a culture that had, of necessity, developed an elaborate visual and social grammar for expressing desire, connection, and beauty under conditions of criminality: using classical references, fitness culture, and studio aesthetics as cover for work whose actual purpose and audience was understood by its makers and consumers with perfect clarity and was simply never stated.
Fitzgerald’s particular contribution to that tradition was to bring to it a formal quality and emotional depth that most of his contemporaries did not achieve. His photographs of Bennett — the man he lived with for forty years and called his friend — are love letters in the only language he could afford to use. The restraint is not coldness. It is discipline in the face of exposure, the formal mastery of a man who had learned to say everything through composition and light rather than through words.
The critical comparison with Mapplethorpe is worth returning to here, because it raises a question about the history of art that goes beyond Fitzgerald’s individual case. George Platt Lynes made extraordinary homoerotic photographs from the 1930s through the 1950s and destroyed much of his work before his death, terrified of what it might reveal. Danny Fitzgerald made extraordinary homoerotic photographs in the early 1960s and simply stopped distributing them, retreating into a private life that left no public record. Robert Mapplethorpe, working from the 1970s in a transformed legal and social landscape, made substantially similar photographs and became an internationally celebrated artist.
The difference between these three men’s careers is not, in any significant measure, a difference of talent. It is a difference of historical timing and the legal conditions that determine who gets to be public about what they make and why they make it. Fitzgerald was doing, in 1962, what Mapplethorpe would be celebrated for doing in 1982. The twenty-year gap between them represents, roughly, the distance between a world in which a gay man making photographs of male nudes in Brooklyn had to use a French pseudonym and a post-office-box address, and a world in which the same man could have a gallery show and a critical biography.
That gap, and everything it contained — the caution, the silence, the forty years of life lived in coded language, the archive stored in boxes until after the photographer’s death — is itself a document of what it cost to be a gay artist in mid-century America. The photographs that survived it are the more remarkable for having been made in those conditions.
A Last Note on Richard Bennett
Richard Bennett is, as of the time of the 2013 publication and exhibition, the living embodiment of the Les Demi Dieux archive. The man who modelled for the photographs, who shared the house and the camera and the life that produced them, who was present at the Steven Kasher Gallery signing copies for people who had fallen in love with images of him made half a century earlier: his continued existence is itself a form of testimony.
When he says “friends, in the Greek sense of the word,” he is speaking with a precision that is not evasion but the deepest kind of accuracy. He is locating himself and Fitzgerald within a tradition — the tradition of devoted male companionship, of philia as a form that contains everything that later centuries would parse into more specific categories — that both protects and describes the relationship with equal fidelity.
What they were to each other is visible in the photographs. Forty years of shared life, forty years of a man photographing with the attentiveness of love the person he lived with, produced a body of work that speaks for itself clearly enough. The word “friends” is a frame around something that does not need a different word to be understood.
Sources
Danny Fitzgerald and Les Demi Dieux (primary): LesdemiDieux.com — Photographer biography; LesdemiDieux.com — Richard Bennett profile; LesdemiDieux.com — Brooklyn Boys 3: Richard Bennett (excerpt from monograph); LesdemiDieux.com — Carroll Gardens and 1960s tags; LesdemiDieux.com News.
Exhibition and publication: Steven Kasher Gallery, Danny Fitzgerald and Les Demi Dieux: Brooklyn Boys exhibition page; Out.com, Brooklyn Boys exhibition review (December 2013); Swann Auction Galleries / Photophilia blog, Danny Fitzgerald and Les Demi Dieux (November 2013); Allbookstores.com reader reviews of Brooklyn Boys (2013).
Physique photography context: Wikipedia, Athletic Model Guild; ArtBlart, Bob Mizer Athletic Model Guild; Goodreads, AMG Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild: 1000 Model Directory.
George Platt Lynes (comparative context): The Eye of Photography, Georges Platt-Lynes: A Forgotten Master (2019); Artforum, George Platt Lynes (1981); Fahey Klein Gallery, George Platt Lynes biography; Robert Miller Gallery, George Platt Lynes.
