Lust Unearthed

On the heels of his bestselling and award-winning book Out/Lines: Underground Gay Graphics From Before Stonewall, Thomas Waugh offers more historic and erotically charged drawings, depicting aspects of gay male sexuality that were once hidden from public view.

The more than 200, never-before-published images in Lust Unearthed are from the private collection of Ambrose DuBek, a Hollywood costume and set designer (his work included George Cukor’s 1939 film The Women) who died in 2002 at the age of 87, and whose estate included a wealth of erotic materials, including books, periodicals, prints, and films. DuBek was a passionate advocate and patron of the arts who felt that life and the body were to be celebrated; he had no patience for other people’s attempts to make him feel guilty for his attractions and desires, nor any qualms about the different worlds in which he operated. The images from DuBek’s collection published here are remarkably frank and explicit depictions of gay men “in action” created by numerous artists both famous and unknown, and produced during a time when even nude images of men were illegal, and thus rare. Lust Unearthed brings these images out of the boxes in which they were carefully kept and into the light of present-day, where expressions of gay male sexuality can be validated and indeed, celebrated.

Waugh’s text is a remarkable history lesson that illuminates a once-furtive underground culture. Gay porn for the thinking man, Lust Unearthed will beguile and arouse.

Features an introduction by Willie Walker, the founding archivist at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender History Society in San Francisco, where DuBek’s erotic materials were donated.

Thomas Waugh is the author of the Lambda Literary Award shortlisted Out/Lines and Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from their Beginnings to Stonewall. He is a professor of film studies and director of the Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality at Concordia University in Montreal.