Bill Schmeling (30 April 1938 – 12 September 2019), better known by his pen name The Hun, was an American artist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries famous for explicit, homoerotic fetish illustration and comics. Recurring characters include Big Sig—a naïve but sexually adventurous, semi-literate young man—and Gohr, a barbarian in a brutal post-apocalyptic world. His style is hyper-masculine exaggeration: muscles, nipples, and genitalia drawn past realism into grotesque scale. Sex scenes routinely involve BDSM with heavy bodily fluids, including urolagnia and scatophilia. Prison rape, fisting, leather and uniform fetish, and police or military settings are commonplace. For gay leather and BDSM-art history, The Hun is the artist who refused to clean up the pig side of the fantasy—slimy, hairy, messy, and proudly taboo.
Early Life, Influences, and the Name Torro
Schmeling lived in Portland, Oregon. At five he was already drawing what he later called “hunky dudes in varying stages of undress, duress, and excess.” He had no formal training but named major influences: Tom of Finland, Dom Orejudos (Etienne), A. Jay, Rex, and Bill Ward. Professional erotic work began in the 1960s for Physique Pictorial and other beefcake magazines, first under the name Torro. As The Hun he produced comic series—including Hun Comics and Gohr—built around gay men’s fantasy sexual adventures. His stories became regular features in Meatmen, Drummer, and Handjobs magazine. He also made art for gay bars and businesses such as Bunkhouse (Los Angeles), Manhole (Chicago), Mineshaft (New York City), and Studstore (San Francisco), plus private commissions. That dual market—print serials and bar-wall branding—put his pig aesthetic on both magazine paper and club walls.
Partnership, Tom of Finland Circle, and AIDS Charity
In 1978 Schmeling met lifelong partner Roland Bynum. During the 1980s, while living in Los Angeles, he formed a close friendship with Tom of Finland; the two men hosted artist salons in their homes and shared working practices—a direct lineage link between the Finnish leather icon and the American fluid-and-fist extreme. Throughout the 1980s Schmeling frequently donated art to charity auctions for AIDS patients across the country. Exhibition history includes The Drum in Houston (1983), Fey-Way Studios shows, and the 1986 Naked Eyes showcase organized by Olaf Odegaard for the International Gay and Lesbian Archives, highlighting gay men’s visual art. In 1988 he collaborated with Jack Fritscher on two feature-length Palm Drive Video films built around hundreds of his drawings: The Hun Video Gallery 1: Rainy Night in Georgia and The Hun Video Gallery 2: Chain Gang Bang—moving still fetish art into video galleries for home-video leather consumers.
Books, Exhibits, and Critical Praise for Pig Freedom
In 1997 Schmeling wrote a foreword for ’Rasslers, ’Ranglers & Rough Guys: The Erotic Art of Matt, expressing longtime admiration for fellow erotic artist Charles Kerbs. In 1998 the Tom of Finland Company published The Hun Book, a major collection. In 2004 Nazca Plains published a second volume, Fetish and Fetters: A Selection of Artwork. In 2003 the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art featured him with Michael Kirwan, Howard Cruse, Rob Clarke, and Adam (Jack Bozzi) in the Deliciously Depraved exhibit. Durk Dehner’s 1995 praise remains the definitive community blurb: The Hun lets viewers “be pigs… as cruel as all hell… endure excruciating pleasure… dish out or take the slimy, grunting, brutal, hairy, messy, expansive limits of taboo kink”—and all without “unsafe acts or cruelty to animals—oh, I mean men.” Dehner called him “the ultimate safe sex provider”: fantasy extremity that stays on paper and screen rather than endangering bodies. The Tom of Finland Foundation later awards a Bill “the Hun” Schmeling Single Figure Award each year in its Emerging Artist Competition. A 2023 foundation online exhibit noted that his artist name personifies the intensity of the work and that he spearheaded a more intense gay erotic style—scenes and fantasies other artists avoided, plus a uniquely grotesque hyper-sexual scale of body parts and fluids.
Leather Archives Donation and Honors
In July 2019, near the end of his life, Schmeling donated remaining artwork, notes, and materials to the Leather Archives & Museum (LA&M) in Chicago. LA&M periodically sells comic reprints and merchandise featuring his art, keeping the brand in circulation for new leather generations. Honors include the 1993 Pantheon of Leather Business of the Year award; the 1999 Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work from the National Leather Association International (shared recognition year with Hardy Haberman); induction in 2002 into the Tom of Finland Foundation’s Erotic Artist Hall of Fame—only the third inductee after Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen) and H. R. Giger; and the 2004 Pantheon of Leather Northwest Regional Award. That Hall of Fame placement—third after Tom and Giger—is the institutional statement: The Hun belongs in the first rank of modern erotic artists, not only as a niche fetish cartoonist.
What separates The Hun from cleaner leather pin-up traditions is willingness to draw the fluids, the fists, the prison hierarchy, and the uniform force that many other artists soft-pedaled. Big Sig’s naïve hunger and Gohr’s post-apocalyptic brutality give two different narrative engines for the same hyper-masculine body language. Magazine serials trained readers to expect the next extreme; bar commissions put that extremity on walls where men already dressed for the fantasy. The Tom of Finland friendship and salons place Schmeling inside a living lineage rather than as an isolated shock cartoonist. LA&M’s holdings and the annual Single Figure Award keep that lineage institutional after his death in 2019.
For bdsmwild readers mapping gay leather BDSM art, The Hun is Bill Schmeling of Portland: Big Sig and Gohr, Drummer and Meatmen, Mineshaft walls, Tom of Finland salons, Palm Drive video galleries, Leslie-Lohman and LA&M, and a style that treats piss, fist, prison, and uniform as drawing problems rather than subjects to sanitize. He remains the cartoonist who made pig play look like a universe—exaggerated, filthy, and, in Dehner’s sense, the safest place to go all the way.
