Title: Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics from the DuBek Collection Author: Thomas Waugh, with Willie Walker Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press Publish Date: November 2004 Pages: 320 Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

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These days, anyone with an internet connection has access to a mind-boggling variety of pornography. There are websites devoted to girls in glitter and fairy wings, and others that feature only vegetarian models. There’s porn with bleached blondes and fake breasts, BDSM sites with leather and handcuffs, and porn with strap-ons and tattooed girls. Pick a subculture, and there’s probably a pornographic website devoted to it, and it’s only a click (and usually a credit card number) away. Of course, this wasn’t always the case: until the 1960s, porn that wasn’t mainstream and heterosexual was largely an underground scene, with drawings and photographs circulating among collectors and the horny. Lust Unearthed is a fascinating look at the underground world of one such pornographic subculture: gay male erotica in the pre-Stonewall era.

The book, which features over two hundred images interspersed with commentary and quotations from literature, derives from the collection of Ambrose DuBek, a film and television costume and set designer who died in 2002. DuBek’s collection is huge: he had amassed around a thousand issues of magazines with titles like Beach Adonis and Teen Torso, and boxes upon boxes of books and videocassettes. It is on the final two categories of DuBek’s acquisitions that Thomas Waugh chose to focus, however: “Original Art” and “Photographs.” This latter category is somewhat misleading, as Waugh acknowledges in his introduction. In the largely closeted era in which DuBek was collecting, obscene drawings were circulated as photographic reproductions. This book, then, is a book of 20th-century drawings that focus on gay male sexuality. Such a brief and general description, though, fails to hint at the treasures that await the reader.

Waugh organizes the drawings of this volume by theme rather than by artist, and his decision to do so was a wise one. It makes sense to group BDSM drawings together, for example; to do so allows the reader to see how artists from different countries and different decades approached a single theme. Perhaps even more interesting is the organization of several groups of drawings according to national origin: we are presented with the imaginative vision of German-speaking gay artists, which we can then compare to a certain French sensibility, or a British one, or an American one. (Not surprisingly, these drawings tend to play with cliché and stereotype: a British artist who Waugh refers to by the pseudonym “Happyface” draws scenes that feature bobbies, sailors, and guardsmen, while another British artist draws a scene whose centerpiece is a Scotsman, wearing a kilt.) There are also images that draw on classical inspirations and the idea of homosexuality as “the Greek vice,” drawings of couples and threesomes, a section devoted to S/M, and a section devoted to the perennial, if sandy, fantasy of sex on the beach.

Throughout, Waugh’s commentary is illuminating and patently smart, without being at all stodgily academic. The literary quotes that accompany the text are drawn from a variety of sources, though a bit heavy on James Baldwin, Yukio Mishima, and Joe Orton. Never mind, though- the text and images work well together, and the inclusion of literary quotations reminds the reader that the culture of gay male desire has never been limited to pictures. The pictures, though, remain the focus, as well they should. For anyone who wants to know more about artists such as Etienne and Cadmus, Paul Smara and Carl Corley, or for anyone who has yet to delve into vintage gay iconography but would like to know more, this volume is an essential and enjoyable read.