Quick, nasty and narrative.

The illustrations of Michael Kirwan never fail to give me a hardon — surely the highest accolade one can pay a piece of really good jerk-off art.

The illustrations have for me a crude teenage exuberance, as if they were sketched in the margin of a high school notebook, or found in the boy’s bathroom, hallucinatory images of illicit cocksucking.

Yet everywhere there is the patient hand of the mature artist: in the theatrical setups and lighting, the frequent play of clashing patterns, the stagey, orgiastic groupings.

All display a degree of calculation that is neither typical or teenage but truly one man’s vision:

Particular fetishes and concerns keep cropping up. Like the emphasis on feet and footgear, the seemly gratuitous addition of piss into an orgy scene, the affection for rimming, the playacting abuse of top lording it over bottom.

Most distinctive of all is the frank — sometimes harsh — argument that goes on between beauty and ugliness in Kirwan’s art.

“I don’t draw from models or real people,” he writes in one of the many essays — or “rantings” — on his website. “My guys are stand-ins for everyone who’s ever sucked a dick.”

His faces often have that gross humanity one sees in those astonishing WPA murals on the yellowing walls of municipal post offices from the last century. Murals where the figures seem to be part of a parade of political caricatures, the common man in the form of the unvarnished and the unwashed. When I mentioned that his work reminded me of Depression-era Social Realism, of Reginald Marsh and Paul Cadmus in his sailor period, Kirwan silenced me with the beguiling reply, “Frankly, I don’t know half the artists people compare me to.”

Still, there is a wonderful, liberating egalitarianism in his art. His work is loaded with the hot and vulgar couplings of Venus and Vulcan, the beautiful and the crippled, the very young with the very old, all in male form.

At 53, Michael Kirwan has been illustrating dirty stories in gay (and straight) magazines for three decades, bringing the most preposterous fictional sexcapades to life with bold flourishes that mask an unsentimental eye.

He got his art training, he likes to say, when he was a towel attendant at the St. Mark’s Bath, a fam- — no, a notorious sex-and-steam funhouse in Greenwich Village, now lost to legend. Married while still in high school, though always, at heart, a gay man, Kirwan came out in his very late 20’s. “I remember I was reading Gravity’s Rainbow while listening to the Supremes,” he quips with the colorful chattiness that characterized our recent interview.

Michael Kirwan: Before we begin I just have to say I never really “came out.” I just became more lax about protecting my privacy. And I don’t think that straight and queer sex are equally hot. The primary function, the compelling biological imperative, for straight people is to procreate. The homosexual drive is purely about pleasure, lust, and self gratification. To a certain degree, it’s nature’s way of thwarting overpopulation — so the gay role is just as valid as the heterosexual one.

Nightcharm: Why, thank you, Michael. Thank you for validating our parking space here on the planet!

Kirwan: Being an irresponsible, nonconformist degenerate is much more appealing to me than being “normal.” The mainstreaming of queerness into the general culture has effectively left sexual outlaws like myself out in the cold. So while I never “came out,”, I am a fag. Women require a kindness that I am unprepared to bestow in order to get laid.

NC: Like so many of us, then, you became an artist at the baths. Difference is you actually drew things.

Kirwan: Totally self-taught. I had the pleasure of looking at beautiful naked men of every variety for 60 hours a week. Being a lifelong proponent of the “don’t shit where you eat” adage, I developed a coping method that involved looking at those bodies through an artist’s eye alone.

Now I’ve been criticized for not drawing ‘pretty’ men, but I believe that old, fat, ethnic, plain, disabled, and unusual queers are equally deserving of being depicted and recorded for gay history. I consider my drawings as a sort of archaeological record, a history of the secret erotic life of the world I inhabit. I’m always flattered to be compared to Cadmus but I think I’m more akin to John James Audubon — just not quite so scientific.

NC: You’re sort of the anti-Tom of Finland

Kirwan: Tom’s stuff was essential in it’s time for queers to reclaim their masculine identity, but the sexual Utopia he promoted had nothing to do with me sucking off dawdlers in the men’s room at the George Washington Bus Terminal or groping my drunken buddies.

NC: I think the most fascinating part of your work is the constant dialog between beauty and ugliness.

Kirwan: Very early on, probably as a reaction to Tom’s beefcake demigods, I was determined to show ethnic diversity (which didn’t even have a name back then), folks of different sizes and ages, amputees, midgets, everyone that society proclaimed not sexy.

I certainly wanted to fuck them, and I figured I couldn’t be the only one. I knew “chubby-chasers” and “rice-queens” and a host of “other than” aficionados in the New York gay underworld and I thought why shouldn’t they enjoy pornography too.

I also wanted to pair people who were different from each other. There’s a kind of creepy vanity about guys seeking sex partners who mirror themselves. Two pretty boys together? Not much imagination in that.

Besides which, pretty people have very limited facial expressions. No, it’s true! Maybe because they work on their “look” so long, staring in mirrors, toning their bodies, but they become overly self-conscious. Normal folks have no such restrictions. They find it the most natural thing in the world to contort their face into a grimace when they’re having four fingers jammed up their butt.

NC: Do you think you have a “Social Realism” perspective on erotica?

Kirwan: I’d like to think so. I want my drawings to be universal — rather than photorealistic — so I lean more toward cartooning, over-saturated colors and a somewhat skewed perspective. I want people to be slightly alarmed by what they see — at first. And then to investigate the piece closely.

Sex is real, not some unattainable dream. I have no interest in drawing fantasy. My people have to be plausible to me. There is always an elaborate narrative in my head when I draw. There are always steps that lead a person to being bent over a Victorian settee with frayed underwear around their ankles. You don’t end up with a cock in your mouth by accident.

NC: In your work, it seems, no taboo is left unillustrated. I mean those kids in some of your drawings!

Kirwan: Some of the magazines I contributed to did put the emphasis on the just barely legal. But I’ve always felt that youthful experimentation was a valid topic. There’s this bizarre convention that if you don’t show something, it doesn’t exist. Yet kids have sex all the time and to not draw that would make me part of this farce. It would make my life’s work — to represent every kind of consensual sex — incomplete and pointless.

When I was young just about every male I knew had been approached by the parish priest, the scoutmaster, Uncle Winston, some trench-coated perv in the theater balcony or that kid down the block with the slow eye. You either enjoyed it and made yourself available for a repeat performance or you avoided that situation in the future. It was the standard introduction to discovering how your own body worked. Most kids just chalked it up to experience and moved on.

There’s nothing more laughable than these whiners who complain that they were “molested” twice a week by Father O’Malley and now they’re DAMAGED! Boo-hoo. I went to Catholic schools for 12 years and in all that time I never met a single boy who was intimidated by a cleric — they don’t carry guns, after all. And frankly, any teenage male with so minuscule a personal resolve as to be persuaded by a priest should be used regularly as a cumrag.

Now in our current cultural fervor any sex with a teenager is an “assault,” a criminal act. Has there ever been anything more ludicrous than the recent spate of hot blonde female teachers “ruining” the students that they fucked? It’s ridiculous. These spunky lads are lucky bastards and heroes to their pals. The very idea of turning sexually active boys into “victims” is despicable, deplorable and emasculating. But nowadays EVERYONE’S a victim! It’s a way to deny responsibility. Worst of all, it infantilizes the nation

Fifteen year-old boys get blowjobs. It’s not the worst thing that can happen to them. Being labeled as a “victim” for the rest of your life might be. And as far as the priest scandals go, getting diddled in the rectory is a lot less harmful than religious indoctrination. I’d certainly rather be fucked in the pews than mind-fucked by liturgical superstitious idiocy.

NC: Ah. So this is one of your famous “rants”.

Kirwan: I’m a rabidly left-wing old hippie radical: suspicious of corrupt and incompetent government; adamant about human rights, civil liberties and free speech. I watch C-SPAN every day. I follow all the news not to hear what’s being said, but to see what goes unreported. I have theories about everything, not all of them totally sane. I am, in short, a cranky old conspiracy buff.

NC: And a major sweetheart! In any case, we’ve all been driven a little nuts by the nightmare Bush years. Any advice for young artists coming up?

Kirwan: Here’s the rule I live by: Wack off to your own drawings. If they don’t arouse you, they aren’t going to arouse anyone else.

I like a lot of the new gay artists. Their lines are sharp and economical, and they translate well into the mainstream. I come from the old school, a group that included the Hun, Domino, and Blade — as a matter of fact I think I was the first person to use my entire real name. We relied on the ambiguity of our presentations. They were irregular, flawed and homespun. It felt more like folk art.

And … well, I’ll probably get my ass kicked at the next Tom of Finland Erotic Art Fair, but the new generation has a certain sleek modernity that I think is all of a piece with Starbucks, chain restaurants, Gaps, Xeroxed housing developments — the shared consciousness produced by a corporate-controlled media.

NC: Finally, your plans for the future?

Kirwan: I don’t make plans. I don’t envision a future, and I don’t look back at a past. But what the hell! I’d like to write and illustrate a graphic novel, do a large mural, have a radio program, make a horny stop-motion short film, travel the world photographing nude male dwarfs, and have cocktails with my ex-wife.

But I’d be very shocked if any of this actually occurred!

Interviewing Michael Kirwan was exactly what I had expected: a total delight, a pop-culture gabfest, and — as we of a certain generation say — a real fucking trip. And while Nightcharm loves all the brilliant artists that grace our pages, I see Michael’s point when he says there are plenty of artists to create beautiful people in beautiful poses.

His work has for me some of the raw — well, ugliness, for lack of a more diplomatic word — of just that sort of art that makes it into world-class art museums. There’s a certain toughness and idiosyncratic self-containment. It reminds me of what Gertrude Stein said to the young Picasso when he first came up to her salon, carting a canvas.

“I like it,” she said. “It’s ugly. Oh, others will come later to make it pretty. But I like the ugliness in it. It shows the struggle.”

Michael Kirwan currently lives in Los Angeles.
In 2004, the Tom of Finland Foundation named him
Artist of the Year.

To learn more about Micheal Kirwan

Visit his website KirwanArts
Contact him here
Purchase his art here
Illustrations can also be purchased on eBay
(subject to availability)