New York's Dirty Little Secret

Robert W. Richards • “Embraced” • 2009 • Prismacolor Pencil on Paper

Today, anyone looking to see a naked man doesn’t have to work too hard.  If you can’t find a porn website to your liking with a cursory search of the Internet, then check out any gossip blog for the latest celebrity sex photos. We live in a city where the only thing coming between the world and David Beckham’s mega-penis on a billboard in Times Square is a little piece of Emporio Armani underwear.

But that wasn’t always the case. In the ’50s, sodomy was still illegal in New York and it was considered obscene to even mail a magazine about gay issues, let alone display gay erotic art. Nowadays, this magazine riddled with gay dish is given away free throughout the city, but it’s still a bit more difficult to see erotic art depicting images of men with men.

Paul C. Smith • “Say It Loud” • 2009
Charcoal, Pastel & Pigment Print on Paper

That is why an exhibit like “Drawn Together”, an art show featuring steamy drawings of men currently running at SoHo’s all-gay Leslie/Lohman Gallery, is so important.

“I’m looking for images that celebrate being homosexual,” Rob Hugh Rosen, the museum’s director of operations and the exhibit’s curator, says. “I’m looking for images of men together and a lot of the images are very sexy. Lots of drawings of men sucking cock, and some very tender drawings… It runs the gamut of emotion—whether it’s lust or love.”

The exhibit features more than 500 drawings on paper, which are displayed and available for purchase in the gallery.

James Marino • “Luke & Brandin #1”
2010 • Paster on Paper

Charles Leslie, who co-founded the gallery with his recently deceased partner, Fritz Lohman, has a long history of selling gay artwork to gay men. In 1969, Leslie and Lohman opened their SoHo loft as an impromptu queer art space. “We discerned there were many artists in SoHo and as we got to know them, we learned they produced erotica but they could never show it in their mainstream galleries or put it up for sale,” Leslie says. “In the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland tradition, we thought, ‘Hey, let’s put up a show.’ We sent out handwritten invitations to everyone in our phonebook and told them to bring a friend. We expected 60–80 and hundreds of people came through and we sold almost everything we exhibited,” he recalls.

They following year they held a similar show and it also did well. They soon opened a small gallery that dealt in gay art, which was relatively successful until the AIDS epidemic robbed them of their artists and patrons, closing them down in the ’80s.

In 1990, Leslie and Lohman created the nonprofit Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, which utilized a small basement space on Prince Street. In 2006 they moved their exhibit space above ground to the Wooster Street location where it currently resides.

Kenneth Nadel • “Joe” • 2006
Pencil & Chalk on Grey Paper

Though it doesn’t show erotic works exclusively, Leslie/Lohman has a long history of working with images that would make your grandmother blush. In 2002 it went from just displaying them to helping create them. Rosen co-founded the weekly Leslie/Lohman Erotic Drawing Studio where a live male model—who is asked to be hard for at least one pose—inspires a room full of men. Much of the work currently hanging—if that’s the right word for an exhibit full of boners—in “Drawn Together” was created at the workshop or was done by artists who regularly attend the Erotic Drawing Studio sessions.

“Upon entering the black unmarked doors in a basement on Prince Street and [walking] down a long dark hallway with black walls, you feel you are in a transformed space,” says Charles Nitzberg, one of the artists in the show. “It’s like some secret sex club you have stumbled upon. The main room is big and bright and set up like an artist’s studio and the floor has the original stone so you are not afraid to mess up. The space used to be a speakeasy in the 1920s and it still has that feel. The models are all exhibitionists and enjoy showing off sexually. In this sexually charged atmosphere I have clarified what my
artwork is about.”

Miguel Angel Reyes • “Abrazo”
2004 • Colored Pencil on Paper

But just because the atmosphere is sexually charged doesn’t mean that it turns into some sketchy jack-off party. Francis Sheehan, who helped created the Studio and contributed pieces to “Drawn Together”, says that creating sexual art isn’t inherently sexual. “I never create erotic art to turn myself on… In the early stages of the studio workshop we discovered there has to be a disconnect between making sex and making art; otherwise it turns into a sex party. Having said that, we have no control over what naughty tricks the subconscious plays; what comes through the paint brush or pencil can ooze sexuality on a different level…there is a third dimension.”

Robert Richards got his professional start drawing fashion, but as a founding member of the Erotic Drawing Studio, he now works on things that are often in the back of men’s magazines rather than on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. “It’s been a very liberating experience for me,” he says of drawing a live model in the company of other men. “It’s made me so much less afraid of the blank page and taught me to trust my instinct and just put pencil to paper without any drama.”

But Leslie/Lohman isn’t the only live drawing studio in town. Harvey Redding, who co-edited the book Dirty Little Drawings: The Queer Men’s Erotic Art Workshop with Richards, Rosen and Joris Buiks, holds the Queer Art Now erotic drawing workshop at The LGBT Center. Redding says that creating artwork diffuses any sexual tension with the model. “In a very odd way, and as hot as the model may be, the artist ends up experiencing the eroticism viscerally, almost abstractly, and is thus consumed with [the] particular aesthetic problem solving of the artwork itself,” he says. “The experience ends up being sexy and unsexy at the same time. The nuts and bolts of creating a masterpiece [end] up upstaging the model in an odd way.”

While there may be competing venues for gay artists to draw live nudes, it is hard to find many galleries that exhibit explicit artwork, and Leslie/Lohman has always been one of the few in the city. Both Rosen and Leslie say that there is a market for gay erotic drawings, but it is smaller and patrons tend to buy less expensive, smaller works of art. Leslie says that most men don’t want a huge painting of two naked men hanging in their living room like he has in his, chiding, “If your Aunt Matilde comes by, it is disconcerting.”

Still, gay erotic art is making inroads to cross over into the mainstream. While the countless retrospectives of Warhol’s work routinely leave out his explicitly homosexual material, two works by gay erotic master Tom of Finland were recently on display at the Museum of Modern Art as part of a major exhibit and five of his drawings are in MoMA’s permanent collection.

In a world where the mainstream is becoming more pornified, the fact that this sexually charged work is aesthetically heightened makes it appealing to a new generation that can access its fill of porn faster than you can say “Sean Cody”. “I’ve observed that young people are more interested in the artistic merit of erotic work than in the action being depicted,” Richards says. “The computer satisfies their ‘porn’ needs so that they’re able to look at erotic art for its skill and beauty much as we now view the historical religious paintings [that] fill our museums [as] devoid of their once sexual overtones.” Charles Leslie adds, “Sucking, fucking or rimming—it’s the same as it was in Roman times, but wha’s changed is the conceptualization of homosexual sex and the context of social commentary.”

Though gay culture is becoming more acceptable, that doesn’t mean gay erotic art is safe in the hands of private collectors. Both Leslie and Rosen point out that treasure troves of gay art have been destroyed once the collector passes away and the work is inherited by someone who isn’t as enthusiastic about it. That’s why institutions like the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation are needed, to ensure that our cultural legacy will be passed on to new generations who are both enjoying and creating work, and doing it in a way that would shock their queer forefathers whose “dirty pictures” might have sent them to jail in the ’50s.

“There is no longer shame in the artist who creates erotic art and exhibits it, and that is very strong and very important,” Rosen says. “We’re banishing shame.”    N

“Drawn Together” is on display at the Leslie/Lohman Gallery (26 Wooster St) February 17–April 3. Visit LeslieLohman.org for more info. Brian O’Brien is the editor of porn blog Gay.Fleshbot.com.