Showing posts with label Projet X. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Projet X. Show all posts

Thursday, 30 June 2016

Afternoon Fun And Games

See the number after the signature? Yes, this was done in 1997. That was one of the very few times I did a drawing for a specific purpose. Afternoon Fun And Games was done as part of a small portfolio of drawings that was published in the gay S&M magazine Projet X. Projet X was an interesting magazine aimed at an international audience - texts were in French, English and German - all interested in what the magazine called "les sexualités hard". So there was a lot of leather and rubber and chains and fisting and pissing and other stuff-ing to be seen in the magazine. The only glitch - in my opinion - was that for a magazine that was supposed to have no taboo, it had one big taboo - age. Granted, the age limit for models seemed to be a little higher than in the mainstream gay press where every single model seems to retire at age 32. At Projet X, models seemed to be as old as 35, or sometimes even 40. Talk about daring! So of course, when my portfolio of four drawings was published, the editor had to make apologies of a kind by saying that the men I drew were "dans la force de l'âge" (a French expression that means literally "in full maturity"). And of course, there was no question of making me a regular contributor - I should consider myself lucky that they were running my stuff at all. Well, I was, in a way, because the publisher of Projet X was the same publisher who used to publish the gay news magazine Gai Pied Hebdo and they had rejected my older men outright less than ten years before.
That drawing was my way of depicting my favorite sort of "sexualité hard", bondage, as something nice and consensual. I've never been too wild about it because I felt it lacked emotion but once I had colored it, I thought it had a sort of sensual feeling about it. Maybe I should make a comic out of it? There's more to those two guys than this single scene, obviously.

Thursday, 3 September 2009

Punishment for Father

As you can see from the date next to my signature, "Punishment for Father" is a rather old drawing. I still find it very hot. It was actually conceived as an illustration for a novel I only ever wrote the first paragraphs of.

It was also one of my few drawings to be published. And no, I don't mean online publishing, I mean real honest-to-goodness paper publishing. That was in Projet X 39 (April 1999), which had a portfolio of four of my drawings.

That was kind of a strange experience. On the plus side, at last I was being published in a French gay mag (my attempts at having my more vanilla drawings published in the weekly Gai Pied Hebdo in the late 1980s having being a dismal failure - they only wanted young muscular guys, you see). On the minus side, the editor of Projet X felt the need to ask for his readers' "open mindedness" for my "fully mature forces of nature" in the issue's editorial. And that just after he was asking them to be open minded about scatology. It felt kind of weird to learn that to some people, being interested in mature and older men was akin to eating shit. With friends like these, who needs enemies?