What Happens when High Art
and Hot Sex Collide? In Which Queer
Art Scouts Earn their Merit Badges
By Christian Bain

Must art and sex collide? Can't they just get along?

Over a century ago the answer was clear for American artist Thomas Eakins — known for his realist paintings of men at play, boating, boxing and particularly, The Swimming Hole, painted in 1885. The following year, when he impulsively pulled aside the loin cloth of a male model to make an anatomical point during a life drawing class attended by a number of female art students, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts asked him to resign from his prestigious teaching position.(1) Sex, it seemed, was strictly forbidden in the temple of fine art.

This separation was enforced by the homophobic backlash that followed Oscar Wilde's infamous 1895 sodomy conviction. It was one such "crusade against vice" that caused American artist Charles Demuth to return from Paris, where he was a frequent visitor to Gertrude Stein's modernist salon, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1921. He was "going home," he said to a friend he met en route, "to speak for vice."(2) A pioneering figure in American modern art, Demuth also pioneered in painting explicit scenes of gay sexuality shown only to a small circle of sympathetic friends.

As late as 1956, Marcel Duchamp, himself famous in avant garde art lore for, among other things, presenting an unadorned urinal as art in 1914 and appearing in drag in 1920, found it necessary to deny Demuth's sexuality. Too close scrutiny of the sexual orientation of the artist detracted from his art, Duchamp maintained, adding: "The little perverse tendency that he had was not important in his life … It had nothing to do with his art."(3) Demuth could have his place in the history of American modern art, it seemed, but not as an explicitly gay artist.

The very word "vice" now seems like a concept from the distant past. Yet for all of our 21st century post modernity, residues of an era when guardians of civil morality patrolled the night still linger. As recently as June 2002, a sophisticated public radio show host could still quip: "Culture and vice — now those are words you rarely hear together!"

And despite the outpouring of illustrations in gay skin magazines since the late 1960s, a generally unspoken taboo has continued against explicitly sexual imagery in the fine arts — painting, drawing and sculpture. Mapplethorpe photographs may sometimes be shown in leading museums, but sexual imagery in the traditional visual arts has remained marginalized as pornography. Perhaps not surprisingly in view of this taboo, life drawing classes generally remain rigorously desexed. Artists seeking a sexier vision must look elsewhere for inspiration.

One artist did just that. "I had been doing illustrations for several gay erotic magazines," says Harvey Redding, "and I had to work with photcollages to create my sketches." At the time he was also attending two life drawing workshops, both of which were largely attended by gay men, but the models were still doing the same poses he remembered from drawing 101 in art school.

For Redding this seemed like a wasted opportunity. But when he suggested in the more private of the two workshops that the models be guided to take more sexual poses, the workshop host, also a gay man, was unwilling
to try it.

"I thought it would be fun to have sexy models and poses," says Redding. When he talked about the idea with other gay male artists, he found that his wistful vision was widely shared. Equally important, it was supported by Leslie-Lohman Foundation gallery director Wayne Snellen, who encouraged Redding to hold the workshops in the gallery.

When Redding first began thinking about an erotic life drawing workshop he imagined a room full of turned-on artists mesmerized by shockingly beautiful nude men posed to provoke a sexual response. "I thought we would all sit there with hardons and draw," he says.

There have surely been more than a few creative hardons since The Queer Men's Erotic Art Workshop began its weekly sessions at the Leslie Lohman Gallery in December 2000. But another kind of arousal has been most significant — the unprecedented outpouring of creative energy by the more than 40 artists who have produced well over 1,000 erotic drawings, paintings and collages.

Much to his surprise when he started interviewing models who responded to flyers posted at predominantly gay gyms, Redding found himself at a loss for words when it came time to begin directing his erotic models. "How do you ask a really sexy guy how far he'll go in front of a room full of men?" He needn't have worried.

"I was surprised that there really were a lot guys who wanted to do it — an evening where they could take off their clothes and be sexual exhibitionists," says Redding. "It all kind of came into place, step by step. I got very lucky with the first model I interviewed — he was almost physically overwhelmed by the idea. The moment he took his clothes off he went into a kind of sexual trance and it really worked."

Redding also quickly realized that sensuality and beauty are not the only requirements for a good model. A sense of humor, an ease about communicating, and an interest in artists and the arts were equally important. In many cases the best models have been those with their own careers in the arts as actors, dancers, artists and even a video maker. Many of them have helped the group uncover the "political" aspects of the workshop. "I can sense some of them feeling that this was really a tribal activity, a kind of bonding, and sharing an ease about sexuality and connection with each other as gay men."

Even so, neither Redding nor most of the other artists had posed models before, and posing erotic models has its own peculiar challenges. For example, how do you guide a model into a pose that expresses his own unique sexuality? And how much can he move while he's exciting himself without breaking the pose? From the very start it became a voyage of discovery.

"We've been like an intrepid troop of erotic scouts earning merit badges for exploring the erotic and artistic possibilities of the masculine mystique," says Redding. "Now we finally have the opportunity to work from really hot men while they act out their sexual fantasies."

"The first time I came to the workshop it was like every fantasy I've had all my life coming true," says Rob Rosen, who joined the workshop in its second month. "Here was this beautiful man who was aroused and his very first pose was the best drawing I've ever done in my whole life. Suddenly I had this incredible adrenalin rushing through me. I did a ten minute drawing with no feeling of awkwardness. It was so exciting to finally have a real guy there playing with himself after so many years of drawing from porn magazines."

In the process the art scout troop has coalesced into a unique collective of erotic artists. At the end of each workshop, each artist selects one or two pieces from several they have done during the course of the evening to share with the model and the other artists.

This interaction with fellow gay male artists has been a crucial element in building a sense of camaraderie and mutual support among the artists and models.

"Before the workshop I didn't know that creating erotic art was something that could be shared," says Richards. "When I drew for the magazines there was no playback," he explains. "I would work at home alone and send it in. Then a few months later I'd get the magazine and that was the end of it. I never felt I was part of anything. Now that I'm drawing with other artists each week, I feel I'm part of a family, as corny as that sounds. I get to look over their shoulders and see how differently each of us works. I respond to their work and they respond to mine. It's wonderful to get that interaction — there's a real sense of community."

"It's fun to be part of the whole process," says model Robert Clepper, himself an art collector with a successful career in real estate. "Providing these really intimate homosexual situations for artists is really important. It's great to see their erotic work presented as art, and not just as yank material. me. And to be honest, there's also a huge exhibitionist part of it."
"I'm fascinated by the intricacies of desire — how desire plays out, how erotic space is generated, the kind of atmosphere that's created and the different dynamics of looking and the feeling of being looked at, being an object of desire — all those things," agrees model Jordan Crandal. "There's all that play between what the artists see and what they sketch and their attraction that fuels it."

"For most of the 19th century, a gay erotic sensibility was part of the artistic mainstream in a way that was unannounced, but visible enough, to whoever was interested," reports Michael Moon, Profession of English Literature at Johns Hopkins University and an authority on how gayness has infused the work of Walt Whitman and other celebrated gay writers and artists.

In the period after World War II, however, except for the gay erotica in Physique Pictorial and the work of Bruce of Los Angeles and others, gay erotic art was forced underground by fear and paranoia engendered by the homophobic purges of the McCarthy period. Moon sees the workshop as helping to erase the lingering vestiges of that devastating period.

"The Queer Men's Erotic Art Workshop has just begun benefiting the gay community," says Prof. Moon. "It gets artists doing things that they don't have other venues for doing and then it gets the rest of us to thinking about and talking about what these artists are doing and what our response is to it. I think that's truly experimental — we don't know what that is in advance. That's why it's truly worth doing."

(1) James M. Saslow, Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts, Viking Penguin, 1999.
(2) Jonathan Weinberg, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde, Yale University Press, 1993.
(3) Ibid.