world of gay abandon were produced in the inspiration of the moment by Jimmy Wright. It’s not that he was sitting on the sidelines wrapped in a towel at the Club Baths recording the colorful goings-on in a sketchbook. Jimmy was way too preoccupied in the heat of the moment to make sketches. Like the historical events that Goya witnessed and documented later in his etchings and paintings, Jimmy was busy absorbing everything visually and taking mental notes—when he wasn’t occupied himself, that is. It wasn’t that there were no other queer artists chronicling things. There had been a few on the margins. But it’s important to remember that before Stonewall (and even after) everything homo was stigmatized as criminal. The most notorious queer artist was Paul Cadmus, whose classically inspired male nudes and erotically satiric “magic realist” paintings of same-sex encounters made some waves. Cadmus, a gifted draftsman, worked mostly from models in the studio. His works were savaged by some critics, ignored by others. They were eventually rehabilitated in a 1986 monograph published by Lincoln Kirstein, and later by Guy Davenport in The Hunter Gracchus. Harry Bush, a brilliant, self-taught graphic artist also from the previous generation, was definitely a forerunner as well. Bush produced provocative cover art for mid-1960s issues of Bob Miser’s Physique Pictorial and Athletic Model Guild, and through the ’70s he did illustrations for the queer skin mags In Touch, Blueboy, Drummer, and others. Bush worked almost exclusively from photographs in magazines. The boy mags were his primary inspiration, and his renderings took those sleek posed provocations to a lapidary level. His surviving soft-core porn drawings of rowdy teenage hustlers, hitchhikers, lifeguards, fraternity boys, jocks, and military machos were collected in 1994 and published by Green Candy Press in the gorgeous book Hard Boys. Bush came out very late in life. When he retired from his career in the military (he was posted for many years at the Pentagon), he had confided to friends that he’d always worried about being outed and losing his benefits. Jimmy didn’t join the ranks of the night owl graffiti taggers and street artists whose designs could be seen throughout the city, though he did appreciate their desire to make their temporary art public and respected the democratizing attempt that their gesture implied. The work of two of that nocturnal and mostly anonymous crew, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, has left an indelible mark despite the evanescence of their now vanished public messaging. Jimmy Wright’s more emphatic queer citations in his New York Underground Showat the Fierman Gallery in 2016 blew the closet door off its hinges. It featured paintings and drawings produced during those first mid-’70s explorations depicting explicit scenes of cruising, tearoom encounters, bathhouse orgies, public sex, bacchanals in “the trucks,” as well as dreamy iconography of fantasy California surfers, disco queens, and urban cowboys. The narrative approaches elaborated in this series of groundbreaking paintings echo insights gained during his Chicago Art Institute years. Goya appears to have been worried that no one would believe the scenes he had recorded in his stark 1806 “Disasters” series of etchings. On one of them he had scratched “Yo lo vi!” (“I saw it!”). Jimmy Wright didn’t tag any of his New York Underground paintings with a similar testimonial. He may have thought that, with the passage of time, their credibility would be recognized, or, more likely, since queer anything was persona non grata, any thought of future relevance probably wouldn’t have occurred to him. His depiction of a sex scene he had observed at the Anvil in Anvil #1 1975 (see page 21), which is now in the collection of the Whitney Museum, celebrates a glimpse of a bygone pre-AIDS subculture. Jimmy draws and paints from his imagination in a visual language of his own, an approach that “translates form through personal gestures into feelings,” as he put it an interview. A recent critic referring to that breakout series of historic paintings has compared Jimmy Wright’s documentation to earlier images recorded in his writings and photography by Samuel M. Steward. She referred to them as “a singular pair of secret historians who produced true life portraits of radical homosexual America.” The marginality of those clandestine spaces and scenarios was such that they were invisible to the rest of society. Gaydar was engaged 24/7 and cruising was nonstop. Sex was everywhere, but it was still outlawed and still undercover. In a weird way, it felt free. Nowadays young up-and-comers romanticize it (if they consider it at all), but things could get dangerous and sometimes did. During those heady days fifty years ago, hookups and unhooking were rife. And, New York being the pressure cooker it has always been, hard work and survival were paramount. Finding a sidekick (a lover if possible) to share the workload, split the rent with, and maybe settle down with was a hopeful goal. Finding time to make art after taking care of survival details was vital in order to keep focused. § AFTER A LAUNDRY LIST of generic roommates, Jimmy met Ken and things clicked. So Jimmy and Ken decided that they ought to find a more amenable place to live, one with studio space, optimally with mortgage potential instead of endless rent payments and looming threats of eviction. They went looking in the Lower East Side in the mostly abandoned and burned-out 22 The G&LR Jimmy Wright. Baptism at Pilot Oak, 1980.
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