tlavideo.com

Review

Thoroughly enjoyable and utterly unnecessary, editor Thomas Waugh’s playful, pulpy follow-up to his revelatory 2002 volume, OUT/LINES: Gay Underground Graphics from Before Stonewall, is chock full of more than 250 salacious samples of the gay male porn that passed from hand-to-hand back in the days before downloading. The images here, as in the first book, have a vivacity, warmth and humor that is markedly absent from todays commercially machined pornography. One senses that the pleasure of these drawings – most done in pen or pencil and then circulated (sometimes for free, and sometimes for fee) in photographic reproduction – is a mutual one, shared by the artist as well as viewer. Even the technically cruder work - such as the drawings of priapic British bobbies and their sailor boy pick-ups by the anonymous artist Waugh dubs Happyface (for his subjects’ almost imbecilic grins) – expresses a sense of emotional investment and genuine affection for sex that’s rarely evinced in contemporary smut. Without an even marginally legitimized mass market for porn at the time they were created, the pieces here emanate an aura of shared secrets as much as peddled flesh.

In his introductory text to what is essentially an erotic coffee table book (Cream with your coffee, sir?), Waugh, who teaches film studies at Concordia University in Montreal, reveals himself to be a charmingly angsty academic, dithering over exactly why this second collection has come into being. He constantly refers back to the editing, publishing, and public appreciation of OUT/LINES, his prior book, marveling at how much better it sold than his earlier scholarly works, reveling in the nominations and awards it accrued, even noting its Amazon sales ranking. Waugh at once takes justified pride in his astute socio-cultural exegesis of previously marginalized hardcore images while acknowledging forthrightly that, “it was not my pontifical musings, but rather those naughty drawings that sold the book.”

In bringing those drawings – previously stashed away in private personal collections and San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society – to public light, Waugh really did unearth an underappreciated part of gay history with OUT/LINES. He introduced many readers (in easygoing prose that sounds much more like a chatty, erudite friend than a pontiff) to an unexpected side of pre-commercial porn: community-building through visual art. Lust Unearthed, ironically, finds Waugh poking his spade around in soil that he’s already turned. It is not so much a sequel to the first book as a marketable spin-off. Having begun with a bit of a pop-scholarly breakthrough, Waugh and Arsenal Pulp Press, are capitalizing on their success, turning hand-drawn mid-20th century porn into a cottage frottage industry for the Internet age. Rest easy, Professor Waugh, it’s a little naughty, perhaps, but nothing to be ashamed of.

The images in Lust Unearthed are assembled from the archive of a single collector, Ambrose Dubek, a television and stage set designer who traveled in New York bon vivant circles and died at 86 in 2002. Many of the pieces are by artists with similar work in OUT/LINES, but there are some fresh surprises here, including some rare collage-like sketches likely penciled by celebrated painter Paul Cadmus, who never allowed imagery quite so explicit onto his canvases. Other gems include a sequence of sprawling orgy scenes by an illustrator who goes by Jean Vincent and suggest something the famed outsider artist Henry Darger might have come up with had he favored hunky sailors to little girls. And there’s a comically surreal grouping of monumentally outsized penises – one of which is ridden, chariot-style, by a nude man who stands atop a goliath testicle (ouch), gallantly cracking a whip at the swollen shaft, which is a good thirty times the size of his own wee willy, almost lost in the thicket of pubic hair sprouting from the uber-phallus.

Waugh’s choice to organize several sections of the book along the lines of what he characterizes as British, French, German, and American national fantasies seems rather forced, particularly since the provenance of much of the work is unknown. Again, one feels a twinge of over-intellectualization, as if Waugh – despite occasional protestations to the contrary – feels obligated to dress up the fabulously undressed images with heady rationale. On the other hand, many of the individual images throughout the book are genuinely enhanced by Waugh’s smart yet casual captions, which mix shrewd readings of the pictures with homoerotic literary quotes from the same period, and a few corny yet collegial double entendres. Waugh adores his subject matter and his captions feel warmly conversational, as if, in turning the pages, the reader is viewing a personal slide show narrated by the editor.

Conversation, visual and verbal, is ultimately what both OUT/LINES and Lust Unearthed are all about. Waugh even solicits readers to contact him if they can help provide information on any of the unknown artists whose work appears in the pages of his books. These volumes represent the reanimation of a lively, intimately personal dialogue about gay sex and fantasy that’s been homogenized by contemporary porn. Ironically, the hand-drawn images Waugh presents help decommodify our sexuality, even as they are packaged and sold to us in an essentially superfluous second collection.

 -- Jim Gladstone/Books to Watch Out For