Title: Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics from Before Stonewall Author: Thomas Waugh Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press Publish Date: 2006 Pages: 296 Genres:: Gay, Compilation, Erotic Art, Non-Fiction, Sociology Reviewer: SexHerald Staff

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Whether you are looking for an art history book or for good porn, Out/Lines might be your best pick! After a first volume that focused on photography and film, Thomas Waugh continues his groundbreaking documentation of gay erotic material from before Stonewall (before 1969 when such artwork was far from legal.) For this book, Waugh unearthed hundreds of previously unpublished illustrations of explicit gay erotica, which he found in archives, private collections, and small bookstores where he almost reduced himself to bankruptcy. The result is a fascinating anthology of “low” and abject art that put us in contact with a history that could easily be forgotten. This work is intelligent and intensely hot, and will delight both the porn amateur and the scholar (if the two are distinct!)

The structure of the book is convenient and allows for many types of reading. The 200 graphics, each on a plate, follow the 90-page essay by the author. Most readers, I assume, will start flipping through the luscious pictures, and will satisfy their intellectual needs with the witty comments of the author on each page. Once the initial excitement abates, the essay will provide further information and analysis about the fascinating corpus. The text is divided in five parts that give theoretical, historical, political, and formal analyses of the drawings, and provide details about the life and work of 11 of the most prolific artists of the period (from the most obscure to Tom of Finland). Each section of the essay redirects the reader to the numbered plates in the second part of the book, thus asking him to look again at the illustrations with specific themes in mind.

The lusty pictures are going to give you some hot flashes. As Waugh points out in his essay, drawing is more a place to construct fantasies, compared to photo or video, which basically are about evidencing the real. Consequently, these graphics will put you into contact with those scenes you can only imagine: more-than-perfect bodies, gigantic genitals, impossible positions, abundant and simultaneous orgasms, etc. The variety of artists featured brings in many styles of illustration: from the broadly traced caricature to the carefully drawn erotic scenario. And if you think that kinky stuff is all post-sexual revolution, you will be proven wrong; those pictures abound in power play, uniforms, orgies, S&M, public sex, and so forth (though vanilla is not excluded.) The pictures also show a lot of inter-class and interracial acts, often giving them some political edge.

This anthology proves the existence of a very active gay underground, especially from the 30s to 60s that to some extent built a gay erotic iconography that is still in use. Consequently, the socio-cultural importance of these erotic drawings is adds to their hotness factor. Maybe knowing that their making, their distribution, and the acts they represented were prescribed at the time, increases the excitement of looking at them now. Also, these artists took the risk to draw these pictures because of their strong desires (no one made much money), which maybe makes them more intense. In brief, with such a hot corpus and an accessible theoretical essay, doing your gay history homework will never be more fun!