This gossipy, amusing and informative book, explores the artistic, social and sexual lives of the largely homosexual circle that developed around George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, and Lincoln Kirstein. This group used their considerable good looks, charm, and social skills to meet everybody, it seems, and developed careers that were probably in excess of their true talents. Nor were they shy about borrowing to maintain lifestyles devoted to good living, beauty, and, well, younger men. Based, in very large part, on interviews with the participants, this book is a fascinating look into how one prominent group negotiated more-or-less openly gay lives in the years before Stonewall. The "triography" strategy in which each figure is given a few pages in turn (there are also chapters devoted other members of the circle) results in a great deal of repetition as the same anecdote appears in turn as each participant is discussed. The book is somewhat untidily written and under-edited. ( )