When I was growing up, in the forties and fifties, there were no images of naked (full frontal/genitals showing) men, none. Against the law. Naked Christs-on-the-cross had their amazing diapers and naked Greek male sculptures had weird leaf-shaped genitals. How this influenced the education of little girls I can’t imagine, but little boys had personal reason to doubt that Greeks had things like that. Forty years later, in the Metropolitan Museum, I heard a little boy, carefully regarding an exposed Greek statue whose leaf was gone, remark perceptively to his friend, “Well, he wasn’t Jewish.”

As a child, little did I know that all across our great land men and boys like me were filling the gap, so to speak, by drawing their own full frontal nudes, often in erotic action. Autodidactic drawing lessons were easily available thanks to the comic strips. You simply traced around the figure of your favorite hero, Superman or Robin or Tarzan, and there was a superb male body on which to draw your own version of his cock and balls, even his erect cock. This highly secret work (Mother mustn’t find your drawings!) was the subject of Thomas Waugh’s fabulous book Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics from Before Stonewall, 2003. Waugh discovered that before Xerox and easy copying processes, before the decriminalization of hardcore porn, countless illicit erotic graphic works circulated clandestinely. Waugh decided that he “had to give the graphic fantasies of our ancestors, mostly anonymous, the space, the forum, and the audience they were demanding.” The book gives us a rare collection of this fragile material, a glimpse of gay sensibility nearly forgotten, accompanied by Waugh’s remarkably original, scholarly, compassionate and witty text.

It was a pleasure to read in the Introduction to Lust Unearthed that Out/Lines was his most “successful” book, noting with his usual sense of humor that it had an Amazon.com sales rank of 261,741. In response to Out/Lines, Waugh received many letters with new information about the subject, including one from a man who identified himself as the anonymous artist of Figures 140-143. As Out/Lines was being prepared for the printers, Waugh learned of “a humungous new collection” that had just been given by bequest to the archives of San Francisco’s Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society. It was a collection formed by Ambrose DuBek, in Waugh’s words “a great humanist collector queen,” an astonishingly well-connected gay man, who made a career in Hollywood, in the U.S.Army thanks to a recommendation from Roosevelt, and then, as a friend of William Paley, as Chief Set Designer and Decorator for CBS NYC studios, where he continued until his retirement in 1986. DuBek was an active member of the gay community, and had the money and the obsession to form this fantastic collection. It is housed in fifty large document boxes that take up over twenty linear feet of shelving. Willie Walker, Waugh’s collaborator on Lust, finished the job of cataloguing it before his death in 2004. Lust shows 237 pictures from the collection. One hopes the entire collection could be published!

Rejoicing in the publication of this rare material, we must not forget that 1) it was published in Canada, and even there Waugh had to struggle with censors, and suppress certain images, and 2) the DuBek collection’s future is not secure from the fire, as our government’s relentless wish to purge the nation of smut threatens every library and archive. It was not only Nazis who burned books, and not only totalitarians. Police in the Netherlands have recently destroyed several gay collections, including the archives of the distinguished Dutch jurist Dr. Edward Brongersma, who was a sort of Kinsey in the field of childhood sexuality. This anti-intellectual barbarism by the Dutch is on a par with the Nazi’s destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in 1933. This was provoked by American anti-sex crusaders who also pester Scandinavian politicians to enact Puritanic sex-control legislation.

Tom Waugh remarks that it is the images that make these books sell, but it is his brilliant text that justifies, honors and illuminates these precious artifacts of our history.