Moreover there are some 19th century erotic pictures… On top of that, the museum had a lot of historically important material, items reflecting the struggle for gay liberation as well as the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. It’s very difficult to find these vintage magazines today because most of the publishers don’t exist anymore and libraries don’t collect pornography. What I found were piles and piles of porn magazines from the 1940s, 50s, 60s and 70s, that gay men had left to the Museum when they died. They allowed me to open their boxes in a very non-bureaucratic way.
I had curated an exhibition at the Museum last year, so I knew the people there well.
#NINETEENTH CENTURY GAY MEN XXX ARCHIVE#
One was the archive of the Schwule Museum in Berlin, the other the online data base of Bruno Gmünder Publishing. How were you able to collect and select all the material published in your book? Starting to realize Clarke’s dream: that gay is just a category to be found on search engine in porn websites and that porn regularization removes the moralism that have always relegated it as a perversion, as he explains in this interview to Il Grande Colibrì. In this research the editor-in-chief of Männer retraces the main moments that, after the 70s’ boys-next-door and the frozen adonis of the post-HIV era, led the common men and the most wild fantasies to become characters of the most recent movies.īetween interviews, analysis and old documents, a lot of exciting pictures accompany the 260 pages of the book: but finally porn has a place in museums and in sociological analysis, is the subject of academic thesis and of exhibitions and conferences. From Andy Warhol to X-Tube” (Bruno Gmünder Verlag). The one who’s been able to realize it is Kevin Clarke, who re-published his “Porn. It was necessary an extraordinary documentation, a great patience, the will not to surrender to the reluctance of a lot of the workers of this industry. It wasn’t easy to write a history of gay porn and its evolution between the decades since Andy Warhol’s time till the present time.