Garrett, Jane. 2024 John Willie: A Bizarre Life. Schiffer Amazon
Jane Garrett has written another biography of mid-century kink artist, photographer and publisher John “Willie” Coutts, best known for Bizarre magazine.
The book has an unfortunate tilt towards the sensational: the opening anecdote concerns, not Coutts, but “Glamour Girl Killer” Harvey Glatman, who kidnapped and murdered one of Coutts’ models, Judy Dull, among others. Glatman, who claimed to be a photographer to acquire victims and actually did photograph them, was the poster boy for the “sex killer” moral panic, a sign of the influence of pornography. Coutts himself first appears in the narrative reacting to the news about Glatman, afraid of being associated with such a person.
Perez Seves portrays Coutts as a perfectionist artist struggling against the practicalities of life. Garrett sees him as a utopian idealist in the deeply repressive and violent world of 1940s and 1950s America. Her book goes into the struggles of the Kinsey Institute (which collected the works of Coutts and Irving Klaw), and the legal battles over obscenity and freedom of speech in 1950s America. Instead of only revealing Coutts’ crossdressing at the end of the narrative (something that wouldn’t surprise anyone who has studied Bizarre), she establishes her subject’s fascination with female-gendered shoes and clothing early on. This positions Coutts as at least queer-adjacent and closeted, and links his vision of a world of free personal expression to the sexual and queer revolutions to come after his death.
Despite the efforts of Coutts, Klaw and others to stay within the letter of the law, they faced harsh attention, both official and unofficial. Coutts was never subpoenaed by the Kefauver committee, but a magazine called Behind the Scene singled out Bizarre as “a special kind of gutter literature … the pornography of perversion!” It claimed that “To obtain such [fetishized] objects … the fetishist will often steal, or even kill!” and even clutched its metaphorical pearls that Coutts’ damsel-in-distress comic Sweet Gwendoline hinted at lesbianism.
Garrett returns to Harvey Glatman as the herald of the downward arc of her subject’s life. After his move to Los Angeles, Coutts was alienated from the adult industry, sliding into alcoholism, and haunted by the death of Judy Dull. He supported himself as a photographer and kept working on Sweet Gwendoline, selling to his private mailing list, but eventually succumbed to cancer.
How do we compare the two Coutts biographies? Both works have endnotes and references, though only Garrett’s has an index. Perez Seves’ is a better psychological portrayal of the man, his work, and the people he knew. Garrett’s provides more historical context, such as Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking sexuality research and Senator Estes Kefauver’s anti-porn crusade.
One chapter explores the trans-Pacific cross-pollination between Coutts’ work and the Japanese bondage magazine Kitan Club, first published in 1947. Starting in December 1953, Kitan Club published pirated Coutts art in every issue for a year and a half, and his art definitely influenced the style in the Japanese publication. In turn, Japanese elements entered Coutts’ own bondage work.
