This may strike some of you, or most of you as odd…but most of my sexy guy sketches start with my seeing something aimed more at young heterosexual males…some pin-up photo of a sexy woman…and I’ll find myself thinking Hey…that’s a nice pose…but I’d rather see a guy in that photo… 

The young pirate I did some months ago was actually one of those little pirate statuettes you find for sale at some seaside resorts…a sexy female pirate being served a jug of ale by a little monkey.  I bought the statuette and when I got it home did several quick sketches, recasting her as a young man, and adding some background detail and giving him a slightly more direct and challenging look.  I guess you could say I butched him up a tad…but only a tad.  I was reaching for a sense where he’s beautiful and sexy but not in a passive way, such as I often see in most male heterosexual skin magazines.  I’m trying to thread a middle ground between the hyper-masculine art I see in a lot of gay magazines and the hyper-feminine stuff I see in straight boy magazines. 

It seems the gay sensual archetype here in the U.S. is the hunk.  I’m really not into that.  But I’m not really into uber twink either.  There is very little I find myself responding to in any of the gay magazines or the online photo galleries.  I’m not into porn.  Porn is obvious.  I want to be teased.  I like the sensual and beautiful over graphic sexuality.  And no…this isn’t just a middle aged guy loosing his interest.  I’ve always been like this.  In a world that must seem to the pulpit thumpers like it’s swimming in sex, there is very little in it I actually like.  I don’t see that as my being particularly finicky.  I’m an artist.  I don’t like saying that about myself because it sounds so damn pretentious, but there it is.  I spend a lot of time with my feelings…alone at my drafting table, or out and about with one of my cameras.  I know perfectly well what turns me on and it’s not that I have a sexually narrow bandwidth, it’s that the culture I live in does not like to admit that men can be beautiful and sexy that particular way.  Most of my skin magazines are Asian and that’s not because I have a thing necessarily for Asians, but because Asian cultures seem more willing to admit that males can be beautiful and sexy in a way that isn’t hunk.

There are males like that everywhere.  But here in the U.S. they have to dress like slobs or butch up or they catch grief from other U.S. males.  Once upon a time, back in the 70s and early 80s, sexy lean and beautiful guys could wear their jeans tight and low and their hair long and their cut-offs high and nobody gave it a second thought.  That was a great time to be a young gay man I’m here to tell you.  But then as the gay rights movement grew and became more vocal, heterosexual males experienced a kind of gay panic and then those gawd awful baggy pants and swimsuits began to appear and all the sexy beautiful males went into hiding, lest someone think they were gay.  Meanwhile, gay males, after being told for generations that they were pathetic mincing swishy faggots, began to reclaim maleness for themselves.  That’s a good thing, but alas it’s become too much of a good thing.  At least for me.

So when I want to spend some sexy time at the drawing board, I find myself inspired more by straight boy pin-up girls then by anything I see in the gay press or online on the gay websites.  It’s weird I guess, but except for the passivity I usually see in it, I find myself drawn more to that then to explicitly gay stuff.  I just mentally switch the gender of the subject a lot.  I find myself looking at something that is very nice, but would be greatly improved by adding a few ‘Y’ chromosomes.  But not too many. 

The sketch in the previous post started out as a photo of a gay guy in low riser jeans with thong straps rising up slightly in a very sexy way from the pant waist.  I thought that was a good idea, but I didn’t like his pose and he was a tad too muscular for my taste.  I like muscle…I like the hardness of the male body…but there are limits.  Then I saw another photo of a woman in a very tiny bikini and a hat.  She was looking at the camera in a pouty pin-up girl kind of way.  I took her pose and the idea of the low risers and thong straps and tried to combine the two.  I made the pose a tad more assertive and changed the facial expression from pouty pin-up girl to more introspective and sensual male.

I do most of my pencil work these days on layout paper because it’s easier to erase and re-draw and I am a hunt and peck kind of draftsman, not a professional by any means.  I am completely self taught and it probably shows.  When it’s sexy time at the drafting table my goal is making myself all hot and bothered.  It isn’t like I have anyone in my life to do that to me.  So I do it to myself.  I find that it’s often the simplest strokes of the pencil that can have the most dramatic results.  The concentration level is intense…almost trance like…while I’m working with the pencil.  That logical analytical side of my brain is working on the mechanics of drawing, and at the same time it is dispassionately watching the libido.  I draw to make my libido go…Damn!  Goddamn! 

Beats sitting alone in a bar pondering the fact that Facebook is feeding me ads for Mature Gay Dating now.  I would love to find a nice, good looking, good-hearted gay guy about my own age to date.   As long as he wasn’t mature.

[Edited a tad…]