The Barn 1948 and more Dirty Pictures by Blade

In Neel's own words...
The following was written by Neel himself and is reprinted in its entirety from the above book.

Before I could talk I could draw recognizable pictures and it wasn't too long before they began getting DIRTY. Early in grade school I sketched my beating-off buddies — drawing them right into the action. Once I found it put them right into the mood for getting their young nuts. The country near Seattle, Washington, where I grew up, was and still is the greatest place for swimming, hiking, fishing and hunting trips. Since us guys were scared to death of knocking up a girl or getting VD, we spent weekends together off on a boat or in a tent, developing HOT one-on-one relationships, while school was often one round after another of shower and locker-room jack-off sessions…nobody worrying about who was straight or queer. Gay was a secret code-word. By ten or eleven, I had pulling-off pals for every day of the month with extras always horning in. 

I won scholarships to art school and to private classes given by a well-known regional artist and was just getting nicely started with a good art background when a family disaster plus the DEPRESSION dictated my earning my living. Work was scarce and after drifting from one odd job to another, I hitched to California where I luckily found one that used my designing and drawing talent. I never stopped drawing HOT guys, continuing my education at various night classes. Instead of the loggers, sailors, fishermen, etc., I'd sketched in Washington, it was college jocks, lifeguards and cowboys — both real and Hollywood style — and many of them became photographer's models for early physique magazines. Not badly built myself, I posed for many photographers too, but the pictures were not printed — at least not here…a Danish mag pirated a few — because I was anxious to keep my anonymity. At that period it was illegal even to possess male nude photos and I resisted the temptation to have any of my artwork published, afraid my DIRTY PICTURES would land me in the slammer. 

Joined the Merchant Marine for WW2 and shipped — mostly on oil tankers — all over the world. Aboard ship with other HOT youngsters confined for as long as 28 days from port to port — Navy gun crews were particularly horny — and in foreign towns from Sydney to Vladivistok, I managed to find an unending source of American or Allied servicemen and civilians, wild for action and keen to pose, again…straight along with the queer fellows. One day in New York, near the close of the war, decided me, I'd found HOME at last. I still am fond of California and visit there every year or so, but Manhattan is the only place to live! 

My first SERIOUS set of DIRTY PICTURES, drawn at the inspiration of a photographer friend, and printed here for the first time with the dialogue I wrote at the time — 1947-8 — to go with it, represents an early thrust out of the closet. Regulations had relaxed somewhat and my pal and I took the dare; he printed up twelve sets of the twelve drawings and gave them to a gay bartender we knew, to sell. He also rented out stag movies and had his apartment raided that week before he'd sold a single set. From those original twelve sets, confiscated by the NYCPD, THE BARN was spread all over the globe and must have made a lot of dough. My photographer friend had a nervous breakdown — worrying that his fingerprints may have been caught on the prints…and that the law would trace him and come to haul us off to jail; he had me scared enough to store years of sketches at another pal's apartment — and things got tighter until the mid sixties. 

I at least had great moral support during that time, good friends such as George Platt Lynes, who took such excellent photos — 8 x 10 of the original 11 x 14 BARN drawings — that, when they were stolen at gunpoint in the sixties, I didn't feel bad…George's negatives assured prints that would all but duplicate the drawings. Dr. Kinsey took away the last shred of phony SHAME I ever have had about expressing myself, drawing DIRTY PICTURES, assuring me that they're art…insisting on having copies of everything to go into the archives at Bloomington, Indiana. David Loo, a sadly neglected and fine writer on queer lifestyles, was always a great encouragement to me as were George DeSantis, the first publisher to actually PAY me for my DIRTY PICTURES, Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman of Leslie-Lohman Gallery and Lou Weingarden of Stompers Gallery. 

NOTE: These 12 drawings were the drawings confiscated by the NYCPD on their raid and now known to us only through the photographs and negatives made by Neel's friend, George Platt Lynes.

You can purchase the book from which this dialogue of Neel's is reproduced, The Barn 1948 and more Dirty Pictures by Blade from LLGAF for $10 + $1 shipping/postage each. It is 11" x 8-1/2" paperback with 24 reproductions (12 images from the famous "Barn" series are reproduced above) accompanying nine short stories and one poem with two photos of Blade himself. (See contact information on Location page.)