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The EXTREMELY Homoerotic Art of… Harry Bush

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HISTORIC HOMOEROTIC HALL of FAME NOMINEE:

The next artist be be honored with a gallery within the HeroesNHunks Homoerotic Hall of Fame (as a noteworthy trailblazing artist who had a major contribution to the advancement of homoerotic art) is… Harry Bush.

If you remember or have heard of Harry Bush and are familiar with his sunny, sexy and often humorous homoerotic images, you might have assumed his name was a tongue-in-cheek pseudonym. It wasn’t. Harry Bush was his real name (though online comments from his niece claim he was born Wayne and later adopted his father’s name of Harry Bush).

Harry Bush was "discovered" by Bob Mizer who introduced Bush to the Los Angeles gay community (with which Harry Bush could not identify) and helped him get published.

The homoerotic art of Harry Bush

NOTE: while most of his work was black and white, some color images may be authentic and others may have been colored by devoted fans.

Harry Bush’s masterful drawings of exceptionally well-endowed and deceptively innocent All-American Californian surfer hunks were featured in magazines such as Physique Pictorial, Mr. Sun, Touch, Drummer, The Alternate, Manifest and Stroke throughout the 60s and 70s. Although his work was as popular, recognized and recognizable as that of contemporaries such as Tom of Finland, an inability to come to terms with his own orientation and fear of being outed (and losing his military pension) led Harry Bush to destroy much of his own work and to become even more of an an embittered enigmatic recluse, "derisive of gay culture."

The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush
The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush
The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush

His private life seems to have been somewhat bereft of the exuberant and oft-exhibitionistic joy we see in his work. His years in the ultra-macho ultra-closeted military indoctrinated Bush in what he later refered to as "the standard heterosexual revulsion of queers." It wasn’t until he was stationed in England that he was able to even come out to himself. In the early 1960s at the age of 40, Harry Bush retired from the military to relocate to Los Angeles where his artistic talent was discovered by physique photographer Bob Mizer (founder of The Athletic Model Guild and sometimes called the father of modern male nude photography).

It was Mizer who introduced Bush to the LA gay scene; it wasn’t a happy meeting. After spending his entire career in the closet Bush failed to find his liberated utopia among the queers of LA and was instead revolted by his new circumstances.

The epitome of the tormented closeted gay artist, Harry Bush‘s creative talent was often in direct conflict with his own personal demons. Over the course of his uniformed military career, he served in the USAF for 30 years during WWII, Korean, and Vietnam Wars, was a secret document courier before finally ending up behind a desk at the Pentagon.

The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush
The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush
The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush

Harry Bush regularly had problems with editors who ignored his specifications when printing his work – often printing his delicate and subtle pencil shading darker than intended, making it appear "rough and course." Eventually, Bush also had fallings out with most of his long-tern friends and aquaintances, but in later life (and poor health) was befriended by Robert L Mainardi (who runs a collectibles shop called The Magazine on Larkin Street) who was given the rights to do as he wished with the artist’s works and said the following about the reclusive artist in his books’ introduction…

Bush was one of the most irascible and misanthropic individuals I’ve ever met, an old hermit crab living in a cast-off shell that sheltered him from the perceived slights of society at large, and gay society in particular.

The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush
The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush
The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush

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.”

The artist himself could ask no more of what Mainardi has assembled. Harry Bush: Hard Boys (available in my Amazon store) is an impressive 200-page collection of gorgeous cock-teasing raunchiness lovingly rendered with classical technique on heavy stock. Edited by ROBERT MAINARDI, who also wrote the introduction, the book also includes a foreword is by THOMAS WAUGH and an afterword by JIM FRENCH.

Harry Bush: Hard Boys

Harry Bush: Hard Boys examines the life and work of this brilliant, mysterious, and paradoxical gay artist. Featured are some of Bush’s best-known works along with previously unpublished drawings from the artist’s private sketchbooks, as well as excerpts from Bush’s correspondence that offer insight into a complex personality: egomaniacal artist, self-critical individual, frustrated homosexual, and acerbic social commentator. This eagerly awaited collection allows fans to rediscover Bush’s witty, beautifully executed work while exposing it to a much wider audience.

The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush
The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush
The homoerotic art of Harry Bush The homoerotic art of Harry Bush
The homoerotic art of Harry Bush

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.

Despite using his real name when signing his work, Harry Bush managed to hide his work from his extended family. They apparently wasn’t aware of his fame as a homoerotic artist until after his death and didn’t find any of his work in his condo because Bush had asked Mainardi to remove it.

via AfterElton, EdgeBoston, BoyCulture, Xtra!, 5Magazine, Drawfellas and Nightcharm


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