Apart from finding his work compelling, both sexy and powerfully disturbing, my reason for being interested is on several levels. As a profile on a sex site said “I don’t have a dirty mind – I have a sexy imagination”. He does not care about that he is proud to be a voice of hidden spaces. Probably both camps find he stirs fears they have about their own unspoken sexual fantasies so he is unspoken about by all but those who share his world. Prudes and moralists one expects but liberal thinkers find in Rex things that will not win them ‘good as you status’. In someway Mapplethorpe did this extremely cleverly with his dual invitations to uptown and downtown, a sophisticated manipulation of consumer desire. Unlike Rex, who doesn’t care if people are offended, I have always found myself wanting to mediate between camps. I don’t share either view but am very interested in where and why the lines get drawn. In Rex’s case he has been considered deviant and debauched from both sides of the argument. A whole section of human life is relegated to blacked out shops and internet viewing. From The Barbarini Faun in Munich to Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time by Bronzino, and up to the glossy concoctions of Helmut Newton and Herd Ritts, finely crafted erotica is OK but generally, penetrating (especially penetrating) or explicit acts are not be part of the conversation. Images deliberately crafted to appeal to sexual tastes have always been around. Personally (and I know Rex agrees) there is no reason pornography should not be considered as serious and art. Gay fetish is still in the corner, age-of-consent room for deviants if it is present at all. But still gay porn in particular and anything not given the pre-fix ‘fine’ art, especially where fetish is depicted, is mostly a taboo too far. For instance the British Museum’s ‘ Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art’ (2013/14) and remarkably the Warren Cup’s prominent display there. Pornography, undeniably a factor in social history, is beginning to get discussed in a sensible way. If you are not programmed to reject the content (I identify with much of it) what strike me is a fine artist of quality: these are not just dirty doodles. He did so mostly because print writers were looking at gender and queer studies but also because, collected by and known to figures such as Andy Warhol and Mapplethorpe, his work found a place in celebrity auction sales. Fine art curators have only very recently begun to tolerate looking at figures like Tom of Finland who has now breached their prejudice. Understandably cautious – like Tom of Finland he has been constantly abused in terms of copyright and for the supposed unacceptable nature of his imagery – we have been corresponding for a long time now. A central figure in the era after Stonewall, if anything Rex was the person Mapplethorpe followed with his X portfolio works explicit imagery, but hardly anyone is aware of that fact.
![erotic gay sex art erotic gay sex art](https://boypost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/gay-boy-art-7.jpg)
I wanted to hear first-hand about a scene, one I knew from friends and from imagery, to get a first person account. I got to know Rex online having purchased some ephemera from his dealer in America.