Joe MacDonald–I was thinking about him yesterday and I’ll tell more in a bit.
But he was a big part of the fashion landscape when I started looking at fashion mags ca. 1974.
He was lantern-jawed and yet you felt there was something rather odalisque about him, too. He pretty much could play the requisite hetero image repertory but there was some faint hint of put-on that made him more provocative. (It reflects in some way the fact that advertising codes hadn’t quite caught up with the actual feminization of men’s wear in the 1960s. Today it would all kind of blend into metro.)
And after all, isn’t the fact that a performer can’t entirely be the character he/she is playing that makes performer and audience bond in a sense? If there is a distinctive image to be (convincingly or not) overcome. It becomes sort of our-little-secret, in the transaction between performer and spectator.