CURTAIN CLOSES ON DAVID LEDDICK’S FABULOUS LIFE

Gay South Florida Author And Entertainer Dies At 93

Steve Rothaus Special to SFGN

First, he wrote in his own advance obituary: “Always moisturize your neck. You never know. Someday it may be your face.”

And secondly: “When you look back on life, the greatest successes and worst failures will both feel very much the same. What is important is that you live and not have any what might have beens. Go out there and fight for your dreams ... dare to do it … give it your best shot. And in that way, whether you succeed or you fail, you succeeded.”

Leddick’s friends and colleagues all agree: He succeeded grandly.

“David Leddick was straight out of Central Casting as a ‘bon vivant’ and a person here in Miami, who we revered as a world traveler with accomplishments and a storied career, sharing lessons with us all,” said Broadway director Richard JayAlexander, who first worked with Leddick in As Time Goes By ... Our History in Song, a 2001 South Beach Gay Men’s Chorus concert at the Colony Theatre on Lincoln Road.

Before the concert, Jay-Alexander said he was a bit nervous directing Leddick, a retired New York advertising exec who had written several best-selling photography books – especially popular with gay readers – including Naked Men and The Male Nude

“I’m a huge fan of David Leddick’s writing,” Jay-Alexander told the Miami Herald in 2001.

A year later in Miami Shores, JayAlexander directed Leddick in The Nature of the Beach, a play written by David Sexton, then a local fitness trainer, and co-starring other gay South Beach personalities of the era including former professional baseball player Billy Bean and Martini Tuesdays party planner Edison Farrow.

Leddick “loved holding court,” recalls Jay-Alexander, who a year ago relocated from Miami Beach to Rancho Mirage, California.

“The cast was composed of actors with experience and some with none. It’s what made the play work. David was in the latter category, but he was a personality and his own creation who brought a unique charm to the role,” Jay-Alexander said after Leddick’s death. “He loved to perform and the experience set him on fire to continue acting, singing and dancing in his own creations. David was truly in the category of ‘one of a kind.’”

Leddick was born Jan. 13, 1930, in Detroit. He grew up during the Great Depression and World War II.

Even as a child, Leddick lived the gay life. “I had my first boyfriend when I was 4,” he told the Herald in 2003, when he published The Secret Lives of Married Men, a book that featured interviews with 39 gay men who had been married to women.

During the early 1950s, Leddick served as a U.S. Navy officer in Korea. After returning to the U.S., he lived in New York City and performed as a dancer at the Metropolitan Opera.

“His military service had a profound impact on his life, as it helped him to understand the importance of discipline and teamwork, which he later applied in his advertising career and literary life,” Leddick wrote in his own third-person obituary. “In his later years as a prolific writer, he would sit at his manual Royal typewriter and push out at least one page of written work per day.”

During the mid-century Mad Men-era, Leddick worked three decades in the ad business, rising to Worldwide Creative Director for Revlon at Grey Advertising in New York.

The self-described “grand raconteur” loved to reminisce about living nextdoor to the movies’ Sherlock Holmes, Basil Rathbone; his long friendship with gay English media personality Quentin Crisp (who years later he portrayed on stage); and the June 1969 Stonewall uprising.

At the time, Leddick lived in Greenwich Village, down the street from the Stonewall Inn. A police raid there sparked the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.

Leddick usually underplayed the moment’s historical significance, sardonically saying in his own obituary that he “slept through it.”

In 2001, he told the Miami Herald that he watched the clash from his apartment across the street.

“It did not seem like a major event. There were a lot of police raids at the time. Yes, there were a lot of drag queens out there throwing bottles. It was a highspirited, aggressive kind of brawl. … It wasn’t the French Revolution, but it was a turning point.”

In the 1980s, Leddick bought a South Beach apartment behind “a dilapidated flop house” soon to become the renovated Versace Mansion.

During early retirement in his new hometown, Leddick wrote several gaythemed novels including My Worst Date and In the Spirit of Miami Beach.

After performing with the gay men’s chorus and in The Nature of the Beach (which has never been revived professionally), Leddick starred in another David Sexton play, a 2003 Christmas-themed musical with some lasting popularity among LGBTQ+ theater groups across the U.S.

It’s a Fabulous Life (It’s a Wonderful Life with a gay twist) has been frequently performed in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale. Leddick starred in productions throughout the 2000s.

“He played Arthur, the angel who comes back and shows Joe, the protagonist, what his life would have been like if he hadn’t been gay,” said Sexton.

“The lesson that I learned from David became incorporated into the show, when Joe realizes there’s so much he loves about being gay,” Sexton said. “At the end of the show, he wishes he was gay again.”

For much of the 2010s, Leddick performed solo cabaret shows. He also wrote a full-length musical, Rent Boy, which had a brief 2013 run in New York.

Rent Boy was based on Leddick’s 2011 nonfiction book, Escort: 40 Profiles with Photographs of Men Who Sell Sex

“Forty profiles with photographs of men who sell sex. I’m not taking a moral position myself. It’s fascinating,”’ Leddick told the Herald, saying he found the escorts in magazine and website ads.

Each featured escort was paid $100 and given their David Vance photos shot for the book, Leddick added.

Throughout his later years, Leddick split time between Miami Beach, Montmartre in Paris and in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Sexton said he spent time with Leddick last year on his 92nd birthday.

“We had lunch and he was in great spirits. Very funny and very sharp.”

Six months ago, Leddick moved to Alabama to live on a farm with family.

“He got COVID soon after he moved to Alabama. That was the beginning of his decline,” Sexton said. “It was the second time he had COVID, even though he was fully vaccinated. He was in and out of the hospital most of the time he was in Alabama.”

Sexton said Leddick “showed me what a fully lived gay life could be” and always cherished his greatest role, being a gay role model.

“He really embraced his place as an elder of the tribe and was not shy at all about telling his story, because he felt it was important,” Sexton said. “More than not afraid, he was really fucking proud to be as old he was and how alive he was.”