Rediscovering Ogden Codman, Jr.: Queer Life in the Gilded Age
2024 Pocantico Spring Forum with Dr. David D. Doyle, Jr.
David Rockefeller Creative Arts Center at Pocantico
FREE | Advance registration required.
Ogden Codman Jr. was an influential American architect and interior decorator who designed Kykuit’s interiors in 1909. He is most well known for coauthoring the seminal design manual The Decoration of Houses (1897) with Edith Wharton.
Throughout his prestigious career working with the upper echelons of society, Codman was active in the gay subculture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His unapologetic self-understanding and connection with a community of queer men were distinguishing features of his life and work. At this year’s Pocantico Spring Forum, Dr. David D. Doyle, Jr. will provide a compelling overview of Codman’s life as a gay man in the Gilded Age. Dr. Doyle also will explore the parallels and divergences between Codman’s nineteenth-century sexual identity and modern concepts of sexuality and gender.
The lecture will be followed by a reception with special access to the DR Center gallery, currently showing Portraits of Process.
David D. Doyle Jr.
David D. Doyle, Jr. is the dean of honors and scholars programs, director of the university honors program, and an adjunct assistant professor of history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Dr. Doyle completed a Ph.D. in American history from the City University of New York, and is completing a book examining male sexuality in late nineteenth-century New York and New England. He has published pieces in Reviews in American History and The Journal of the History of Sexuality.