Leather Archives & Museum: 25 Years
The official catalog celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Leather Archives & Museum. The catalog features essays, collection photographs, and highlights over the LA&M's institutional life.
The official catalog celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Leather Archives & Museum. The catalog features essays, collection photographs, and highlights over the LA&M's institutional life.
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dreamed of, revelling unashamedly in all the<br />
throws and ecstasies of male-dom. Dom<br />
began his drawing career in Tomorrow’s Man<br />
#8 (1953) and quickly became the artist-inresidence<br />
for Kris Magazine. He took on the<br />
name Etienne, French for Stephen, his<br />
middle name, for his traditional oil, acrylic and<br />
graphite panels, storylet tableaux and<br />
Stephen, for his more thematic pen and ink<br />
comics-style fetish creations. He was a great<br />
storyteller, always with a narrative, and<br />
became well known for his multi-paneled<br />
story arcs, ranging from six to over twenty<br />
panels long.<br />
As noted, Dom pushed boundaries. One of<br />
his early Kris Art storylets, “The Young<br />
Warriors,” featured full frontal nudity in mail<br />
order sets very early on. While, indicative of<br />
the time, he suggestively drew his subjects<br />
with strategic coverings, many of his original<br />
works and stories were later altered or<br />
redrawn to show full nudes. Never classically<br />
trained in life drawing, some of his works<br />
were proportioned to a less even degree than<br />
others but never exaggerated to unbelievable<br />
nor grotesque extremes. What was in<br />
evidence, was his innate ability to draw the<br />
male form from any angle, often to best effect<br />
viewing from above or below, to emphasize<br />
the power of dominance and submissiveness<br />
of certain positions, especially of captives. He<br />
exhibited an uncanny appreciation and<br />
knowledge of the body’s physiology and<br />
musculature.<br />
watersports and scat. From the beginning,<br />
Dom strived for meticulous, fully-rendered<br />
detail in his primary subjects. His acrylics and<br />
oils showed an intense if not brooding<br />
masculinity, with rich brushstrokes and great<br />
depth. His graphite works often took a week<br />
to build and fully shade, as Dom felt that<br />
facial expression was crucial to conveying<br />
eroticism.<br />
By the early 1970s, Dom was splitting his<br />
time between Chicago and a back country<br />
house in Pennsylvania . Here, he had the<br />
chance to concentrate on his art over longer<br />
periods, resulting in some very masterful and<br />
long “Stephen” story series, which he<br />
completed while resident artist for friend Lou<br />
Thomas’ Target Studios. These published<br />
works included the Adventuretime series,<br />
Meatman, Star Trick, and Troopship, to name<br />
a few (many of which were re-released in the<br />
1980s as part of Falcon Studio’s Storytime<br />
books). Pen and ink drawings for most of<br />
these are found in the Original Art Collection,<br />
while published versions are in the Teri Rose<br />
Library.<br />
Striving for artistic perfection, some other<br />
early works were reworked and reinvented<br />
into new series (example: Jack from the<br />
unpublished “Cop Rape” series became Sgt.<br />
Mack McAllister in “Marine Training”).<br />
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his work<br />
quickly developed its own recognizable style,<br />
reflecting a high degree of realism and of the<br />
masculine ideal, not to mention, Dom’s own<br />
fetish leanings. His rendered chests became<br />
broader, clothing succumbed to ripping and<br />
his feet --booted, sneakered, socked, or<br />
naked, received a particular emphasis. Other<br />
fetishes given the spotlight were military<br />
(seminally, Navy) uniforms, cowboys,<br />
superheroes and, of course, <strong>Leather</strong>/Levi.<br />
Also present but rarely seen were nods to<br />
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