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
wow.
I’m a BIG fan! Just ordered a hardcover copy from Amazon. THANKS!
Huge fan of Harry’s work. His sense of humor was always a bit lame to my eye, but his excellent line and killer sense of the erotic always more than made up for the corny/obvious jokes. He observes the form of his guys in a way that only Josman can compare with among the modern breed of gay erotic illustrators. And I’m partial to Harry’s more sculpted renderings. I’m definitely buying the book.
The drawings clearly took a lot of skill, and the guys have nice bodies and poses – but the faces look like 8-year-old boys. That is outside my age range and a deal-breaker for me.
FYI, the hardcover isn’t $50, it’s $31.50 at Amazon (after they apply their discount –link)
Not much more than the softcover.
Steve, I must agree, Harry Bush is surely the greatest American homo erotic pencil artist of last century, but to say only Josman comes close?
However good he is, there are a multitude of other great talents these days, starting with Harry’s pupil Tom Jones, and then a whole lot that exhibit regularly at the Tom of Finland artfair, like Sean Platter, Michael Kirwan, Palanca, Minoru, Benoit Prevot, the twinks of Joe Phillips, Glen Hanson, Mike, Leonard, Rosco, the stable of artists around Patrick Fillions ClassComics, George Cayford, and a multitude of other Euro artitsts that exhibit at Adonis-Art in London.
I could go on a while . . .
Ad, in the sprit of continuing the dialog, I’ve got to say that from what you’ve just listed it sounds like you like just about *every* prominent gay erotic artist regardless of their look/skill. A lot of those guys you named don’t observe or care to observe the form they’re attempting to worship. I love cartoons, mind you, but I get bored when I feel people are building their look on top of layer after layer of abstraction without ever going back to the source.
I always appreciate a drawing built on a solid foundation of anatomical understanding, such that when any rules are ‘broken’ it’s obviously by choice and not by mistake.
What I’m surprised about (see my initial reaction to this posting) is just how conflicted the artist was and the life he lived, in seeming constant self-imposed torture. It’s a great exposé.
hot and since alot of these guys look like the guys at my highschool…don’t worry i’m however old enough to look at this blog i’m a senior…but anyways the guys remind me of the kids at school…no blk guys though…that would of been hot!!!
Tom Jones – the present day artist who does male erotic art work
has a collection of correspondence he had as a friend of Harry Bush.
They are available to read on his website.
it seems to me that harry is being pushed into a stereotypical profile that is more than unfair to him and his art. in all respect to Robert Mainardi, the author, let me point out that he had extremely limited contact with Harry and even being the ‘lucky’ recipient of Harry’s remaining drawings, knew a miniscule of Harry’s history and psychology.
my letters that he quoted are his only source for much of the personal history aspect of his commentary. and those letters were the tip of the iceberg of the info that Harry went on to relate. the few of us with whom he shared his ‘earned’ observations of Southern California gay culture (and it was an incestuous and sometimes perverted hotbed) after having navigated quite well a military career during homosexual purges, aren’t as much impressed by the negativity of the man, as by his persistent ability to maintain his connection with the innocence of his youth.
an innocence constantly corrupted by publishers, tricks, american society in general and his gay ‘family’specifically. his humor is on many levels, and the guy who doesn’t like it is only showing that he hasn’t yet ‘been there, done that’ ok, i’m a bit overly sensitive to this kind of commenting/dishing/ego-enhancing opinion giving, in spite of the fact, once again, i’m giving mine. Harry was a great artist. i think Mainardi goes a bit over in his ‘locked bedroom grumpy recluse’ word count percentage. someday i hope to put all Harry’s letters out there and let his story be at least somewhere unfiltered by others. also, i wish i could take back all my own words, observations of my opinion of Harry, because time has changed altered them completely.
Thank you, Tom Jones, for the above comment.
Mr Jones was a longtime friend of Harry Bush, who acted as his art mentor.
It’s the writing that got me hard!
cheers from Toronto,
Drasko
Reminds me of John Buscema’s pencil drawings.
Very nice.
I bought Harry’s stuff back in the 70’s. He sent out 8 X 11 glossies of his beach drawings. I cut them up and “played” with them. I would undo that if there were a button I could press. Wonderful artist. I’ve got the book on order (for $4 more than your site lists it) with Amazon. Thanks.
thanks tom jones for chiming in, i knew there was something suspect to the proprietary aspect of the author, Mainardi’s line. and i look forward to future publications and interpretations of the work.
since this article has appeared on the site, i have been trying to find an old cartoon i cannot forget about a “kept boy” letting his “daddy” know he wants a Porsche, and a stereo….” why it means so much to find it, is i think the same strength that others are mentioning. there is a truth to his verbage that strikes quickly and is supported by the image in a way far superior to anything that i have come across in two days of surfing…it is everyone of us.
while I have found some very good work in my search, to be discerning, barely anything brings the immediate arousal that this man’s work does.
are there any other image collections of this man’s work to share?
Hi Sketcher,
here’s the exact wording on that sketch . . .
While the fat dicked guy is sliding legs-apart from the couch and his benefactor is offering him a glass of champagne, he says: I need a stereo, and a pair of water skis, and maybe a trip to Hawaii, and I saw a Porsche the other day . . .
I would pass it on here if I could. Like Tom Jones I’m also guilty of trying to guard the artwork we hold dear, treasure with our lives and keep it within the circle of repected artists we hold dear.
This one however is part of the Bush collection of the db site
It is also on page 75 of the book though
The drawing that Sketcher and Ad are referring to is at right.
It is included in Harry Bush: Hard Boys.
It’s amazing how much I learn about the world of gay here at Nightcharm. Sometimes I’m reading along here and realize I don’t know shit about nothing. I just know I like sex with guys – but it’s nice having some of the spaces filled in. Thanks!