Donald Merrick (August 11, 1929 – October 14, 1990) was an American artist of the mid and late twentieth century. Leather culture and gay SM know him by the name Domino. His erotic drawings of men do not look like Tom of Finland’s polished ideal. The ink makes rough working-class men into objects of desire. For BDSM readers he belongs with the Drummer-era illustrators who put boots, jackets, mud, and an ugly-beautiful masculinity on the page, and who wanted museum walls to hold hot gay porn as solidly as any other art.
Merrick was born in Crosby, Minnesota. After high school he worked his way across the country for several years: a logger near Mount Rainier, a cab driver in Chicago, a forester in New Mexico, and a sailor in the U.S. Navy. He earned a bachelor’s degree in art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, in 1955, a master’s from the University of New Mexico. The public career was a real success. He taught at the University of Missouri and at Virginia Commonwealth University, moved to New York in 1960 as art director of Arts Magazine, and in 1963 became head of the fine arts department at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Rutherford, New Jersey. In 1984 The New York Times profiled him, and his work showed at the Zim-Lerner Gallery. He called himself “more of a humanist—not perfect in detail, but more in terms of putting across the feeling of personality.” Labor was the subject. He liked people while they worked: police officers, truck drivers, gas station attendants, restaurant workers. “I believe very strongly in the importance of a person’s work to his life,” he said. He later insisted that this public painting was not the work that mattered most to him, sexually or as art.
The name Domino, the marriage, Drummer
The work he cared about was the erotic drawing. In a 1978 interview with Al Shapiro and Jack Fritscher he said that drawing the American male was “really far more vital, personal, and important” to him than the American Scene painting he did for a living. He was drawn to men early and was drawing them by his teens. The most lustful sheets went out under the name Domino, and many of them show gay sex. Fritscher said the pen name stuck because, said quickly, it sounds like Don Merrick. During his marriage he hid those drawings and often destroyed them. After the divorce he kept them and showed them. Gay readers celebrated him for that. He was friends with other gay erotic artists, and Drummer published him. The first public show of the erotic work ran at Stompers Gallery in New York from December 1978 through January 1979. Two months later it moved to Fey-Way Studios. The catalog became the book Domino: Original Drawings and Prints. In 1986 Olaf Odegaard included him in Naked Eyes, a showcase of gay men’s visual art for the International Gay and Lesbian Archives. Merrick died of AIDS-related complications on October 14, 1990.
Men of our realities
The erotic drawings come from working men he had known young: dairy farmers, iron miners, Army recruits. Tight leather jackets and muddy boots, he wrote, “made my heart pound long before my dick did.” Tom of Finland was an influence, and also a disappointment. Domino did not want that unreachable beauty. Real arousal felt “more real, more unique,” so the job he set himself was to catch particular kinds of sex appeal in ink, including men who were ugly, dirty, or threatening. If he could make rough, raw, aggressive working men into objects of desire, he thought he might one day match what Tom had done. Not Tom’s “man-of-our-fantasies.” Domino’s “men-of-our-realities.”
In 1978 he said he wanted hot gay porn to be “something as solid and lasting as the art of the museums.” The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago holds some of what survived. In 2016 the GLBT Historical Society hung a retrospective, Stroke: From Under the Mattress to the Museum Walls. The title is nearly his biography: hidden under the mattress, then up on the museum wall. In 2023 the Tom of Finland Foundation showed his erotic art in AllTogether, a queer exhibition for Pride month. Later leather illustrators in the same line include Michael Kirwan. Leather readers still treat Domino as the artist who took men Tom of Finland had idealized past recognition and made them sexual again: dirty, threatening, at work, and hot because of that, not in spite of it.
