Twentieth-century Boy ─ Notebooks of the Seventies

A celebrated New York City painter's rollicking and vividly immediate account of his life amid the city's glamorous demimondes in their most vital era as an aspiring artist, roaring boy, dandy, cultural omnivore, and far-from-obscure object of desire.

Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. He also happened to be outrageously, androgynously beautiful, attracting the attention of the city's most prominent gay scenemeisters, who found his adamant heterosexuality a source of immense frustration. Taken directly from the notebooks Hannah kept throughout the seventies, Twentieth-Century Boy is a louche, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining report from a now almost mythical time and place, full of outrageously bad behavior, naked ambition, gender-bending celebrities, fantastically good music and evaporating barriers of taste and decorum. At its center: a young man in the mix and on the make, determined to forge an identity for himself as an artist while being at risk from his own heedless appetites. A time capsule from a scary, seedy, but irresistible time and place.

DUNCAN HANNAH was born in Minneapolis in 1952. He attended Bard College from 1971 to 1973 and Parsons School of Design from 1973 to 1975. In the seventies, he became associated with New York's avant-garde and glam and punk rock scenes, acted in a number of underground movies, and showed several of his figurative portraits in 1980's infamous Times Square Show. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum and the Minneapolis Art Institute. He lives in New York with the designer Megan Wilson.