Richard Avedon, the most successful fashion photographer of all time, was married twice and fathered a son, but now, a dozen years after his death, he is being outed as a bisexual.

Michael Gross reveals in “Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers” (due July 5 from Atria Books) that Avedon and his first wife, Dorcas “Doe” Nowell, spent their summers in Cherry Grove, the gay mecca on Fire Island.

Nowell — the model for Audrey Hepburn’s character in “Funny Face” (Fred Astaire played the Avedon-like photographer) — later told a daughter that Avedon was gay. “It was not a secret between them,” Doe’s son Nowell Siegel tells Gross.

Neither was it a secret to Avedon’s early assistant Earl Steinbicker, who thinks Avedon hired him because “he was attracted to me.”

Steinbicker believes Avedon had an affair with the writer James Baldwin, a high-school classmate, but later fell out with him when Baldwin was late with an essay for one of Avedon’s books. “He said, ‘That f - - king [N-word],’ ” Steinbicker recalls. “Those were his exact words.”

http://pagesix.com/2016/06/19/richard-avedon-outed-as-bisexual/