The Hun: Bill Schmeling’s Pig-Play Fetish Art of Muscle, Leather, and Fluids

In gay erotic art from the late twentieth century into the early twenty-first, Bill Schmeling, under the name The Hun, built a rough, heavy visual language. He was born on 30 April 1938 and died on 12 September 2019. He never had formal art training. What he had was an extreme exaggeration of the male body and a fixation on fluids and texture, and that was enough to make him hard to skip in this field. The drawings are not a soft look. They hit: leather, uniforms, fisting, and prison scenes pushed into a grotesque, filthy register.

Hyper-masculine scale, Big Sig, and Gohr

The work turns on blowing male features past realism. Muscles, nipples, and genitals leave believable proportion and land at a grotesque scale. The exaggeration is about force and raw sexual tension, not a perfect body. Sex scenes usually come with a lot of fluid, including urolagnia and scat, and the atmosphere is sticky, hairy, and chaotic. Prison rape, fisting, and uniform fetish in police or military settings all carry a hard power exchange. These are drawings of adult fantasy, not instructions.

Two characters keep that look going. Big Sig is a naïve young man, hungry for sexual adventure, and semi-literate. Gohr is a barbarian in a post-apocalyptic world. They are two engines for the same hyper-masculine body language: Big Sig for naïve hunger and a passive role, Gohr for raw brutality and an active one. Schmeling refused to tidy the pig-play side of the fantasy. He drew the taboo, the filth, and the mess and left them on the page.

From Portland to Los Angeles

He was drawing early. At five he was already making pictures of what he later called “hunky dudes in varying stages of undress, duress, and excess.” Professional work started in the 1960s, when he used the name Torro and drew for Physique Pictorial and other beefcake magazines. As The Hun he made comic series including Hun Comics and Gohr. Those stories became regular features in Meatmen, Drummer, and Handjobs.

The drawings also left the page. He made art for gay bars and businesses—Bunkhouse in Los Angeles, Manhole in Chicago, Mineshaft in New York, Studstore in San Francisco—and he took private commissions. Magazine serials and bar walls were one market: the pig aesthetic sat in someone’s home reading and on the wall of a club. He named Tom of Finland, Dom Orejudos (Etienne), A. Jay, Rex, and Bill Ward as main influences, and from that base he pushed further into fluids and a violent erotic look.

Partnership, Tom of Finland, and AIDS charity

In 1978 Schmeling met Roland Bynum, his partner for the rest of his life. In the 1980s, living in Los Angeles, he became close friends with Tom of Finland. The two held artist salons at home and shared how they worked. That friendship is a direct line from the Finnish leather icon to the American extreme of fluids and fists.

Through the 1980s, as AIDS hit, Schmeling gave work to AIDS charity auctions around the country. The art showed at The Drum in Houston (1983), at Fey-Way Studios, and in Naked Eyes (1986), organized by Olaf Odegaard for the International Gay and Lesbian Archives and focused on gay men’s visual art. In 1988 he and Jack Fritscher made two feature-length tapes for Palm Drive Video: The Hun Video Gallery 1: Rainy Night in Georgia and The Hun Video Gallery 2: Chain Gang Bang. Still fetish drawings became moving images for leather viewers buying home video.

Praise, the archive, and the awards

In 1995 Durk Dehner’s comment became the standing one. 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”: the extreme stays on paper and on screen instead of putting a body at risk.

The honors are specific. In 1993 he received the Pantheon of Leather Business of the Year award. In 1999 he received the Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work from the National Leather Association International. Hardy Haberman was recognized the same year; they did not share that one award. In 2002 he became the third person inducted into the Tom of Finland Foundation’s Erotic Artist Hall of Fame, after Tom of Finland and H. R. Giger. In 2004 he received the Pantheon of Leather Northwest Regional Award. The foundation later gives a Bill “the Hun” Schmeling Single Figure Award each year in its Emerging Artist Competition.

In July 2019, near the end of his life, Schmeling donated his remaining artwork, notes, and materials to the Leather Archives & Museum (LA&M) in Chicago. The museum reprints the comics and sells merchandise. A 2023 online exhibit from the Tom of Finland Foundation said his artist name personifies the intensity of the work, that he led a harder gay erotic style into scenes other artists avoided, and that the bodies and fluids sit at a grotesque, hyper-sexual scale of his own. In 1997 he wrote the foreword to ’Rasslers, ’Ranglers & Rough Guys: The Erotic Art of Matt, and used it to say how long he had admired fellow erotic artist Charles Kerbs. In 1998 the Tom of Finland Company published the collection The Hun Book. In 2004 there was another volume, Fetish and Fetters. Those are publications, not a second set of awards, and they are part of the record of an artist who would not clean the fantasy up.