Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics from the DuBek Collection

John Stanley is a senior policy advisor in the Corporate Policy Branch
Management Board Secretariat, Government of Ontario.

Prof. Thomas Waugh of Concordia University has selected and published
200 homoerotic drawings from the collection of Ambrose DuBek, a
Hollywood costume and set designer and gay bon vivant, who died in 2002.
Such materials are usually sold off or simply destroyed after the
collector’s death, but DuBek’s collection ended up in a San
Francisco archive.

This volume follows on Waugh’s previous book, Out/Lines: Underground
Gay Graphics from Before Stonewall (2002), allowing him to revisit this
topic and refine his conclusions. DuBek’s collection included a wide
range of homoerotic materials: only about one-tenth of the original
drawings are reproduced in this volume. While the selection reaches back
to the 1930s and up to the 1990s, most drawings appear to be from the
1950s. While most were drawn by amateurs and autodidacts, there is a
wide range of masculine styles depicted.

Waugh divides his selection into four national groups—British,
German, French, and American—as well as nine genres, including
uniforms, beaches, couples, S/M, and soft-core. Given the current
climate of censorship, seven images were singled out by the publisher
because of their depiction of intergenerational sex. Three of the seven
were eventually permitted, but only after being cropped for publication.

In reproducing these drawings, Waugh admits to a desire to historicize
as well as to reclaim these materials, once considered illegal, but now
seen as worthy sources in exploring homosexuality’s past. Although
Waugh maintains that he is not trying to legitimize “this filthy
smut,” he has still gathered information on each work’s artist and
its provenance. Moreover, he tries to inform the imagery with
appropriate quotations from authors (Mishima, Cocteau, etc.) who are
decidedly part of the High Art tradition. Although such commentary
appears to contradict Waugh’s self-professed desire to keep these
works out of the canon, the quotations do allow him to insert a tiny bit
of Canadiana (through the words of Scott Symons). Regardless of his
intentions, Waugh has returned to circulation the imagery of
pre-Stonewall fantasy.

Selecting and studying the works published in this collection was a
personal voyage of discovery to another milieu and period for Waugh:
readers are likely to share his experience. Lust Unearthed will serve as
a source for any future study of the representation of homosexual in
visual art.