Harry Bush and the All American Porn Boy

Porn names — the kind that make you groan from the klutzy pun grinning toothily from the middle of them — don’t get any more cringe-worthy than “Harry Bush.”

Except Harry Bush was Harry Bush’s real name.

And that’s just the first of many surprises to be found in a new, sumptuously illustrated coffee-table book Harry Bush: Hard Boys, a collection of 230 pencil sketches, featuring a candid memoir by Robert Mainardi, the artist’s friend and major collector.

The reclusive Harry with the all too pubic name led a most improbable, counter-intuitive life.

Far from being a dabbler who was moonlighting from a career in advertisement or magazine illustration — the natural habitats you would think for such a polished draftsman — Harry Bush was, for many years, a deeply closeted Pentagon employee, who took up illustration only late in life, after a brief drawing course in a community college.

Right from the start, in the mid 1960′s, when he sold his first illustrations to the covertly homo Physique Pictorial — a notorious cavalcade of “health cultists” and “male nudists” in gaily striped posing pouches — all the hallmarks of the Harry Bush style were in place: The easy flow of his line; the concentration on blocky buns and heavy dicks; the All American faces that had about them a national lyricism as authentic as Norman Rockwell’s.

Harry Bush was, as Hard Boys points out, a mass of contradictions. He worked under his own name yet lived in fear of losing his Air Force pension as some sort of retribution for being a pornographer. He cut himself off from his family before they could cut themselves off from him. Inculcated with the occupational homophobia of the military, he was revulsed by the world he had entered — the noir side of Hollywood with its hustlers, Johns and fly-by-night models — yet continued to draw that world as a joyous homosexual playground.

Here was a man who brought a lighthearted humor to his celebrations of hard-bodied surfers and manboy teenagers — porn with a wink — yet was relentlessly cantankerous in private, bitterly grousing about the gay scene, never failing in his many handwritten letters to wrap the words gay community in mocking quote marks.

He was, at his most perplexing, a man who complained that his work did not get the presentation and production values such art deserved, yet one who decreed, in a move that must have struck his diminishing circle of friends as impossibly prima donna, that all his works be burnt upon his death.

One is reminded here of Kafka , another self-dramatizing melancholic who made the same death-bed noises. Nobody took him seriously either. Works of art, like prodigal sons, leave home to follow their own stars, on their own terms, in spite of their creators.

“In the course of our decade-long friendship,” writes Mainardi in his psychologically nuanced introduction, “I learned how unusual it was to remain Harry’s friend since, at one time or another, he had had a falling out with just about everyone he’d ever known.”

Mainardi met the artist in the last decade of his life when, sick with emphysema, Bush was “tethered to an oxygen tank” in a modest San Juan Capistrano condo, with, nevertheless, “a cigarette burning at all times.” He smoked “incessantly,” recalls Mainardi, “and was usually surrounded by overflowing ashtrays.” The artist would die of the disease in 1994.

Mainardi had intended, at first, to buy some of Bush’s original artwork. This was the period when the artist was threatening to burn everything. (In fact, large caches of the early Physique Pictorial work seemed to have vanished and Mainardi suspects they were indeed burned.)

“I can not sell anything,” the artist informed him in an early letter. “It is agonizing beyond words to me. I’d rather give something away than ask for money.” To another collector, he wrote, “Sometimes I even savagely tore up originals, swearing that nobody would ever get their hands on them — by manipulation or hoodwinking.”

The artist, we learn, had been swindled many times by both professionals and fans who either failed to return original drawings he’d sent out on spec, or expected Bush to sell them for next to nothing. This is how the artist had come to grief, the key to all his interior contradictions and paradoxes: Harry Bush, the Hollywood pornographer, living way outside the margins of respectability, was himself an emotional innocent.

“He exhibited an almost childlike naivete,” explains Mainardi, “expecting everyone he met to act in an open and honest way, with old-fashion politeness and military dependability. While he often lamented what he considered the lack of these qualities in the gay community, he must also have realized that humans, in general, did not live up to his expectations.”

As for buying original sketches, Mainardi had to tiptoe around the subject. After several letters had gone back and forth, Bush allowed Mainardi and his partner to visit him. Cautiously, gently, they assured him they had no intention of reselling the work and made an offer “that we considered reasonable but he found very generous.” He agreed.

“On subsequent visits he would sometimes be in a mood to sell and sometimes not. Perhaps the fact that we asked, but did not pressure him to sell work, endeared us to him.”

In the end, after a long and harrowing hospital stay made Bush worry that the neighbor looking after the place would get into his locked upstairs workroom and discover his secret life, he called up Mainardi and told him he could haul all the stuff away — in trash bags. “I don’t want any money for any of this shit, Bob,” he told his last remaining friend over the phone. “I just want to get rid of it.”

Mainardi — in fact, no one — had ever entered the locked room before. “I was totally unprepared for the scene that greeted me,” he writes. A “massive sea of debris” filled the room, inundating a large drawing table: “wadded paper, drawings and sketches, hundred of empty Coke cans,” and most dramatic of all, cigarette ash “filling the room like four-foot deep drifts of black snow.”

Hard Boys is the result of that day — and at that, just a sample. Several of the works in the book have never been seen before.

“Harry didn’t want to pass into oblivion,” confides the memoirist who saved the art from the fire.

Harry Bush: Hard Boys is available here in trade paperback.

A $50 hardcover edition is also available.
For more details contact

Green Candy Press
601 Van Ness Ave
E3-918
San Francisco, CA 94102