REX (1943 – March 2024) was an American visual artist and illustrator of gay fetish and S&M life in 1970s and 1980s New York and San Francisco. He refused photographs of himself. He would not discuss a personal biography. He said the drawings “defined who I became” and that there are “no other ‘truths’ out there.” The public record is ink: Mineshaft posters sold in the tens of thousands, early Drummer covers, poppers ads, mail-order hard-core portfolios, and an influence that reached Robert Mapplethorpe’s camera. He was much censored and remained a shadowy figure on purpose. He signed a three-letter name so the cops could not trace him. He died in Amsterdam in late March 2024.
For leather and BDSM readers he is not a side illustration to Tom of Finland. He is the other graphic memory of the same century: flophouse rooms, dripping urinals, glory holes, greasy workers, bikers, stained mattresses, and men who pay by the night. Tom drew a sunny, monumental cock-and-uniform fantasy. REX drew the toilet and the hourly hotel. Both are fetish art. Only one smells like beer piss and cigarette smoke in a hallway crack. That smell is why civic authorities, some gay critics, and later “politically correct” America—as he named the climate that drove him to Europe—could not file him as harmless beefcake.
No Birth Certificate, a Fashion Patron, and the Pissoirs
He was abandoned at birth. His legal name and exact birthday are unknown. References place the birth in the 1940s. Research by leather historian Jack Fritscher points to 5 February 1943. He was adopted young. As a teenager in the 1960s he lived among beatniks and on the streets of Greenwich Village. Sometime in the 1970s or early 1980s he legally changed his name. Still in his teens he became the protégé of a fashion designer who paid for two years of study at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Fashion illustration and commercial art then carried him to London and Paris in the late 1960s while he kept an apartment on Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village.
In Paris and London, he said, his fondest memories were the “cottages”—the tearooms, the public pissoirs, “temples conceived and existing solely to bring relief to the male member,” not distinguishing straight from gay, and unconcerned with color, religion, age, beauty, or wealth. That classless toilet democracy is the political content of the later drawings, whether or not anyone hung them as politics. A public urinal that does not ask who you are is already a theory of sex. REX spent the rest of his working life drawing the American version of that room: not a Paris vespasienne, but a cracked stall in a blue-collar hotel, drilled with a glory hole.
Tom of Finland, a New Idiom, and a Name the Cops Could Not File
Disillusioned with commercial art, he dropped out for several years and re-emerged in the 1970s as one of the leading visualizers of fetish and S&M subculture in New York and later San Francisco. He said he was much influenced by the chance discovery of a probably bootleg magazine of Tom of Finland drawings, which “irrevocably changed his life.” Men “having sex with men, passionately and enthusiastically” “spoke to him in a way no lover or anonymous stranger ever had.” The shock was not information. It was permission: pictures that treated male-male sex as enthusiastic rather than tragic.
His black-and-white pen-and-ink style joined a generation that also included Dom Orejudos (Etienne and Stephen), Steve Masters (Mike Miksche, born David Leo Miksche, 1925–1964), and Luger (Jim French, born 1932). The raw sexual energy of the early sheets matched a leather scene then rising in Greenwich Village, Chelsea, and the meatpacking district around the Mineshaft. Elusiveness was not a branding pose. Explicit homosexual art lived under vague law and contradictory enforcement before Stonewall and, in practice, after it. “I signed myself REX because it was non-specific and untraceable in those days by the cops.” Even when explicit nudes aimed at gay men became more permissible, involvement with gay pornography could still wreck a life. A three-letter stamp was a survival tool.
Freelance work began with the Rough Trade pulp-book series in 1972—twelve images for each story—then poster commissions for leather shops and gay bars around the United States. Pulp plus posters is the correct origin story. He did not start in a museum. He started in the same economy as dirty paperbacks and bar windows.
Mineshaft, Pleasure Chest, Drummer, BOLT, Trading Post
The most famous commercial images of this period were three posters and the T-shirts he made for the Mineshaft, the notorious members-only New York sex club. They sold in the tens of thousands across the club’s thirteen-year life. They appear in the film Cruising: night interiors were shot elsewhere, but the recreation of the club’s rooms includes REX posters. The drawings reflected the sexual activities and the extreme end of a newly empowered pre-AIDS gay community. They celebrated bathhouse culture blatantly and without apology. That is the opposite of a discreet membership card. It is the club’s face on a wall and on a chest.
Other commissions mapped the same geography. In 1976 he made a poster for the pioneering sex boutique the Pleasure Chest, which led to early covers for the fledgling S&M-oriented Drummer magazine in 1977 and to advertisements for the poppers brand BOLT in 1980. Commuting between New York and San Francisco, he also produced posters, catalogues, and calendars for The Trading Post, often called the first gay department store, from 1978 to 1981. Read the client list as a single sentence: dungeon club, sex shop, leather magazine, chemical rush, gay retail. That is the visual infrastructure of a subculture that was briefly allowed to advertise itself before AIDS and civic panic closed the window.
Rexwerk Burns, Magazines, Bar Posters
On 1 July 1981 he opened his own gallery, Rexwerk, in his South of Market studio on Hallam Street in San Francisco. Ten days later it was destroyed in a fire that started at The Barracks bathhouse, then under renovation across the street. The timing was vicious. July 1981 was also the month the first case of what a year later would be called AIDS was diagnosed in San Francisco. A gallery of hard-core gay fetish drawings opened and burned in the same fortnight the epidemic entered the civic record.
Commercial work and original art continued anyway as regular features in sexual magazines: Manifest, Just Men, Torso, Inches, Uncut, In Touch. Colleagues in that erotic-art cohort included Allen J. “A.Jay” Shapiro (died 1987), Harry Bush (1925–1994), and the British artist Bill Ward. Later bar and party posters covered The Brig in San Francisco, The Eagle in Washington, D.C., the Lone Star Saloon in San Francisco, The Lure in New York City, and the original The Saint parties. In 1986 Olaf Odegaard included him in Naked Eyes, a showcase of gay men’s visual art for the International Gay and Lesbian Archives. The magazines and the bars kept the line work in circulation after the SOMA studio was ash.
When the AIDS epidemic took hold, civic authorities and voices inside the gay community called for a clampdown on sexual permissiveness and promiscuity—the very climate REX’s work had celebrated. Rather than submit to what he experienced as suffocating censorship, and increasingly depressed by the deaths from AIDS of nearly all his contemporaries, he stopped publishing for several years. That silence is part of the catalogue. The man who would not be photographed also, for a time, would not be printed.
Secret Museum, Zeitgeist Room, Amsterdam
In 1992 he returned to New York and opened a by-appointment private gallery, The Secret Museum, at 218 Madison Avenue. It lasted until the post-9/11 shutdown of Manhattan’s economy. In early 2002 he went full-time back to San Francisco, where through the bi-coastal years from 1976 to 2010 he had kept a room over the Zeitgeist Bar on Valencia Street. Disheartened by the conservative trend and by what he saw as a lack of opportunities in an increasingly “Politically Correct” America, he moved to Europe in 2010 to live and work in Amsterdam. He found a more accepting climate there for exhibitions that U.S. mainstream venues still treated as radioactive.
The geography is the career: Village streets, Saint Mark’s Place, London and Paris cottages, Mineshaft New York, SOMA San Francisco, Madison Avenue by appointment, a room over a Valencia bar, then Amsterdam. He was never a coastal tourist. He commuted the leather axis until the country he had drawn would not have him on the terms he required.
Mannspielen, Mail Order, Unbound Portfolios
REX published three 8-by-11-inch, 36-page bound portfolios of black-and-white ink drawings titled Mannspielen (Man Games). An increasingly conservative political climate meant newsstands refused to sell them. From the start of the 1980s his main income became the mail-order business Drawings by REX, which issued privately printed, unbound portfolios of hard-core images. The series of advertised sets began with Icons in 1977. The sets were carefully considered and structured. Seen as isolated, redacted details they are diminished. Most erotic artists of the era sold photographic prints. REX sold art prints. The only close previous model was George Quaintance, who independently marketed lithographic prints in the early 1950s.
The unbound 8-by-10-inch, twelve-print portfolios, in chronological order, were Rexwerk, Uncut, Undercover, Armageddon, Scorpio, Rexland, Legends, and REX Sex-Freak Circus. Buyers preferred unbound sheets they could frame without destroying a bound book. Drawings made over months resisted the throw-away tempo of most pornography. Critics place them nearer graphic novel, gay comics, and Japanese shunga than next to a stroke magazine, and nearer the polished scandal of Franz von Bayros’s Tales from the Dressing Table. The mood of the flophouse interiors also finds a parallel in the private edition of Jean Genet’s verses for Parade, illustrated with twenty explicitly homoerotic lithographs of drawings by Roland Caillaux (1905–1977). That is the company REX belongs in: Quaintance, von Bayros, Caillaux, shunga—private-edition erotic print culture, not “gay illustration” as a commercial footnote.
Mapplethorpe, Fey Wey, Fritscher’s Cast List
Robert Mapplethorpe knew REX and was attracted to the hard-core Mineshaft-related imagery. The photographer built a camera portfolio on related themes. Both men had strong links to the West Coast fetish scene and both published with Drummer editor Jack Fritscher. Mapplethorpe was more focused on Los Angeles; REX preferred San Francisco. In April 1978 Robert Opel invited REX to a one-man exhibit at the newly opened Fey Wey Gallery on Harrison Street in San Francisco. Fritscher, who was also one of Mapplethorpe’s lovers, met REX in person for the first time at that opening and wrote the description that still does the work of a wall label:
Rex is the artist of urban toilets, blue-collar hotels, filthy construction workers, greasy gas jockeys, muscled bikers, tattooed fighters, beautiful young homeless bums, ex-cons, armpit-sweaty beautiful studs needing head—all these unshaved “lone wolves” in jockstraps, leather, boots, and torn tank tops, who pay per night in sleaze-bag hotels where sailors, Marines, cops, and drifters lie back on stained mattresses, the smoke of their cigarettes drifting out the crack of their rooms, down to the toilet where the cracked urinal drips beer piss, and the graffiti-covered stall is drilled with glory holes.
That is not a museum abstract. It is a census of the drawings. Like Mapplethorpe’s pictures, any exhibition of such scenes—which also include imagery that has been read as suggesting bestiality, urolagnia, and sexual involvement with boys—remains rare and dogged by controversy. Those last subjects are why civic hangings fail and why a BDSM site should be exact: watersports and animal-adjacent shock belong to the documented controversy of the catalogue; anything that implicates minors is not erotic content for this room. It is part of why the work was hunted, refused, and left to leather archives. Adult fetish history can name the fight without turning the fight into a preview.
Mayor’s Gala, Mohr, Goldstein, Leather Archives
In 1985 REX was selected as one of San Francisco’s “100 Most Influential Artists” and shown in the Mayor’s Art Gala. He was represented by a work titled “Dogtreats,” which drew immediate press condemnation in the San Francisco Chronicle. Philosopher Richard D. Mohr, at the University of Illinois, struggled to find a publisher for Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies (1994) specifically because the book included REX. Richard Goldstein, writing in the Village Voice, condemned the sexual activities of the fetish community and what he called its “Naziphile” sympathies, pointing to REX’s work as evidence. Publicly accessible exhibitions stayed scarce. Amsterdam later proved more hospitable. The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago mounted a 2021 exhibit spanning a broad spectrum of the art, including a few of the controversial pieces—validation inside leather-world walls rather than a MoMA-style canonization.
The Goldstein attack is useful even if you reject it. It shows how easily ink of boots and toilets becomes a political exhibit about fascism, and how useful a shadowy artist is as “evidence.” Mohr’s publisher trouble shows the other half: even academic controversy books could not carry the drawings without a fight. The 1985 gala shows a third path that failed in public: a city trying to name an influential artist and then flinching at the sheet it hung.
Books, Lohman, Hurles, and the Charge of Hypocrisy
A hardcover of fifty drawings, Rexwerk, was published in Paris in 1986 by Les Pirates Associés, the private press of photographers Ralf Marsault and Heino Muller. Bruno Gmünder issued the retrospective Verboten in 2012; the more controversial images were not included, a sign of continued market nervousness around the subjects. A retrospective titled “Persona Non Grata” ran in 1994 at the early Prince Street address of what became the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. The museum holds his work. The complex imagery of the late 1980s and early 1990s in particular is still largely ignored in the mainstream art world. Sex Freak Circus was shown for one night only on 7 March 2013 under the auspices of the Lohman Foundation and The Saint nightclub.
In a book about his friend the photographer David Hurles, REX discussed what he regarded as the hypocritical attitude toward his brand of gay erotica, set against “cookie cutter nudes” and “antiseptic, nonthreatening males posed in luxurious settings”—an idealized homoeroticism with which viewers could feel at ease. That sentence is the aesthetic program. He was not trying to make viewers feel at ease. He was trying to make the toilet and the stained mattress as finished as a Quaintance lithograph. The mainstream wanted the muscle and not the piss. He declined the split.
Amsterdam Shows, Folsom Europe, Hall of Fame, Leather Cult
He exhibited with CNCPT13 in Amsterdam and Uncle Crickey’s Closet in San Francisco. He lived and worked in both Amsterdam and the United States and maintained a pay-to-view website. An exhibition of his work took place during Folsom Europe in Berlin in September 2016. REX was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame in 2022. A new authorized collection compiled by a supporter, Leather Cult, was published in 2023. His art considerably influenced the style of other erotic artists, including Bill Schmeling. The Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago holds some of the work. The late honors arrived while he was still alive to see the Hall of Fame, and the authorized book arrived the year before he died. That is a different ending than the 1981 fire and the 1990s silence suggested. It is not a museum-blockbuster ending. It is a leather-world ending: archive, hall, Folsom, a supporter’s book.
What the Portfolios Are Actually About
Across the unbound sets the recurring cast is working-class and military-adjacent masculinity under bare bulbs: toilets, cheap hotels, construction sites, gas stations, bike shops. Clothing is gear—jockstraps, leather, boots, torn tanks—often half-removed. Sex is frank, communal, and unapologetic, closer to bathhouse documentary fantasy than to soft pin-up romance. Because each plate could take months, collectors treat unbound sets as serial chapters rather than disposable stroke mags. Framing a single glory-hole panel still implies the larger narrative architecture of Armageddon or Sex-Freak Circus. That seriousness is why police-era pseudonymity, mail-order distribution, and later museum hesitation form one continuous story. The work was always meant to last on walls, not only in back pockets.
The pay-to-view website of the Amsterdam years is the digital version of Drawings by REX: still not a newsstand, still not a cookie-cutter nude shop, still a gate. Folsom Europe in 2016 and the Leather Hall of Fame in 2022 are the public gate. Leather Cult in 2023 is the authorized book that finally gathered what Gmünder’s Verboten had been too nervous to finish. Bill Schmeling’s debt to the style is the living-artist proof that the line work reproduced. The Leather Archives holding is the institutional proof. REX got the leather world’s last rites while he was still alive to see some of them. He did not get, and did not appear to want, the antiseptic museum nude.
How to Look at REX from a Dungeon Wall
REX matters because he drew the Mineshaft’s public face, fed Drummer’s early visual diet, advertised poppers and a gay department store, modeled independent hard-core art-print commerce, and forced institutions to admit that gay SM graphics are not only “illustration” but contested fine art. Mapplethorpe’s fame often eclipses him in museum wall text. Leather men who collected unbound portfolios know the reverse hierarchy of dungeon walls. The photographer printed the same subculture at museum standard and became a First Amendment case. The illustrator stayed mail-order, by appointment, and then Dutch. Both are the record. Only one signed a name designed to be untraceable by the police.
Related nodes on a BDSM art map are Tom of Finland, Etienne, Jim French, Miksche, Fritscher, Opel, the Pleasure Chest, the Trading Post, the Mineshaft, Cruising, Leather Archives, Leslie-Lohman, Quaintance, von Bayros, Caillaux, Bill Schmeling, Folsom Europe, and the Leather Hall of Fame. The usable lesson is not that every glory-hole drawing is automatically high art. It is that months of line work, a private-edition economy, and a refusal of antiseptic nudes can keep a subculture visible after the bars close and the contemporaries die. He signed three letters to evade cops and still ended as an influence that outlived the rooms he posted. For adult fetish history, REX is the ink-black counter-archive of pre-AIDS and early-AIDS leather desire: toilets, boots, sweat, and unapologetic cock culture, drawn for walls that were never supposed to be in City Hall.
