Nothing had prepared me. Some years back I had read The Story of O [sic], intrigued by the beginning, horrified after a few pages, repulsed long before the end. Sadomasochists in real life were black-leather freaks, amusing and silly in their ridiculous getups. If a friend, a peer, had told me she had herself tied to a table leg at home after a full day’s work at the office– well, it has never come up. God knows I would not have believed it. [Pg.54]
Nine and a Half Weeks by Ingeborg Day under the pseudonym Elizabeth McNeill, published 1978, is the semi-autobiographical account of her brief, obsessive, masochistic affair with an unnamed man. It was eventually adapted into the notorious Nine and a Half Weeks film in 1986, starring Kim Basinger and Mickey Rourke.
I had viewed and read about the film quite a bit before I read the short novel. It differs in several significant points. (For convenience, I will refer to the POV character as Elizabeth and her lover as John, though he is not named in the book.)
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.
Pérez Seves, Richard. John Willie: The Story of John Alexander Scott Coutts. 2024 Amazon
Coutts in a relaxed moment.
The latest in Richard Pérez Seves’ series of biographies of kink figures in the 20th century documents the life of John Alexander Scott Coutts, better known as “John Willie”, the artist and publisher of Bizarre magazine. Along the way, the reader also meets Coutts’ freethinking model, muse and wife, Holly Faram; the “g string king”, Charles Guyette; National Police Gazette editor Edith Farrell; Harry Bodham-Wetham, AKA “Achilles”, high heeled shoe artisan; photographer and producer Leonard Burtman; and mysterious individuals known only by nicknames like “the Chicagoan” and “Little John” and “A Manhattanite”.
Coutts was a key node in a globe-spanning network of misfits, eccentrics and entrepreneurs. Born to a wealth English family, Coutts could have led a comfortable life, but instead walked away and ended up an itinerant labourer in Australia, then a merchant seaman. In the recorded interviews that are the foundation of this work, he described himself as unusual even from an early age, aware of his strong attraction to women in high heels. His interests brought him to the fetishistic letters in London Life magazine and then to a friendship with contributor “Achilles”, an alias he later used for himself. His dissatisfaction with the fetish content of London Life led him to create what would eventually be Bizarre (he admits he pirated fetish letters from the earlier magazine), but contingencies like WWII and his own difficulty in getting a steady income got in the way. He had to support himself as a seaman while he published the magazine and distributed it by hand on consignment. It was not the “get rich quick” scheme he had dreamed.
Holly Faram, Coutts’ wife, muse and model.
Coutts networked with people in the softcore magazine publishing space, including National Police Gazette editor Edith Farrell and girlie magazine publisher Max “Robert” Harrison, who bought Coutts’ Sweet Gwendoline damsel-in-distress comic strip and other works. Harrison put Coutts in touch with brother-sister duo Irving and Paula Klaw, who had been turned on to the market for new bondage/fetish media by the mysterious “Little John”. Coutts’ artistic perfectionism clashed with Klaw’s profit-driven style and fear of the authorities. The artist had to censor his own work, sometimes hand-painting underwear onto nudes, before the publisher would accept them.
Coutts also disliked Klaw’s business practices, such as not paying models and getting photographers to pay for access to the models and having to hand over their own work for Klaw to sell. Coutts, who prided himself on being a gentleman and a professional with his models, was the producer-practitioner of fetish media, on the border between producers like Klaw and Harrison and the numerous anonymous fans and practitioners. This business partnership did not last.
Bizarre was Coutts’ labour of love, which was both its saving grace and its greatest hindrance. As a one-man operation that was full of his meticulous artwork with realistic bondage, not to mention photography, it couldn’t hope to be published monthly, as promised. Instead of forgettable schlock, Bizarre was haphazardly published art. That’s why we remember Coutts and his work now.
There’s dark stuff in this story too: Coutts’ failed marriage with Faram, his struggles with alcoholism, and the tragic story of how one of his models, Judy Dull, was kidnapped and murdered by “the Glamour Girl killer”, Harvey Glatman.
After he gave up publishing Bizarre and mainly worked as a photographer in Los Angeles, Coutts was diagnosed with brain cancer. Radiotherapy gave him a brief extension, during which he agreed to be interviewed by Paul Gebhard of the Kinsey Institute. The transcript of that interview became the foundation of this work.
Pérez Seves’ book is a beautiful portrait of Coutts and his world, illuminating a history that so easily could have been forgotten. The reproductions of Coutts’ artwork and photography add to the value.
Editorial aside: I think the time is ripe for a John Willie biopic.
Strub, Whitney. 2011. Perversion for Profit : The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right. New York: Columbia University Press. Amazon
I’ve been reading Whitney Strub’s book, and despite its age, it is still very relevant in explaining the culture war over pornography in American politics. One of the things he details is though American history is littered with censorious firebrands like Anthony Comstock, those moral crusaders frequently stumbled over the problem that the majority of Americans don’t care very much about pornography as an issue. Men like Comstock and Charles Keating of Citizens for Decent Literature could mobilize a small, but vocal minority.
As Strub tells it, when the neoconservatives and the New Right rose to cultural power in the 1970s, they had to reconcile their belief in small government, free markets, and libertarianism with more culturally conservative allies, particularly evangelical Christians.
Thought it sought a socially conservative, generally religious voting base, the New Right was heavily corporate-sponsored, and such groups as the Committee for Survival of a Free Congress recognized the value of neocon thought in legitimizing their project of deregulating American markets even as they reregulated American morality.[Pg.190]
We’ve seen this strange-bedfellows alliance ever since, creating people who believe the Invisible Hand should rule everywhere except areas like pornography, abortion, and queer issues.
In 1979 the New Right organizer Paul Weyrich had come dangerously close to admitting the movement’s emphasis on social issues was a shallow commitment designed to garner evangelical votes while obscuring the substantive procorporate agenda of New Right politicians: “Yes, they’re emotional issues, but that’s better than talking about capital formation,” he said. Certainly the corporate benefactors of the New Right’s organizational superstructure valued profits over ideology; Coors, for instance, was headed by a reactionary zealot whose donations largely funded the important Heritage Foundation. But when the company recognized the consumer power of the gay market in 1979, it unhesitatingly ran ads in the gay paper the Advocate. [Pg.191-192]
More than 40 years later, we still see the same dynamic, even if the names have changed: trans people instead of gay people, puberty blockers instead of abortion, “cultural Marxism” instead of “the permissive society”. The 2023 brouhaha over trans streamer Dylan Mulvaney endorsing Bud Light suggests that the free-marketers sometimes back down when challenged by the cultural conservatives. Donald Trump himself embodies this contradictory political alliance: a man with multiple wives and a history of sexual indiscretions, who has been on the cover of Playboy magazine, can somehow be favored by the Christian right and even more reactionary forces. Grifters and quacks like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro, and Jordan Peterson constantly stoke culture wars over issues of sexuality and gender, anything to drown out considerations of economic policy from the discourse.
I’ve said it before, and I hope I’m wrong, but I still think it’s only a matter of time before BDSM takes the place of trans in this particular social-political complex.
Sigel, Lisa Z. 2020. The People’s Porn : A History of Handmade Pornography in America. London: Reaktion Books. Amazon
In the early 21st century, we think of pornography as a ubiquitous, mass-produced, and corporatized phenomenon. Sites like PornHub present the viewer with vast quantities, individually tagged according to theme and sexual act. Advances in video production and distribution technology means almost anybody can make and consume sexual content with a high degree of technical quality and specificity.
Sigel’s book explores an entire history of what might be called “craft” or “artisanal” erotica, produced in single items or small sets, and using a wide variety of media, from carved whalebone to modified mass-produced photos to handmade garments. Many of the items discussed in the book aren’t “erotica” in the usual sense, i.e. items intended to arouse the viewer, perhaps as an aid to masturbation. These artifacts, such as a carved wooden figure of Abraham Lincoln with an erection, might more accurately be described as “adult novelties”.
Storr, Merl. 2003. Latex and Lingerie : Shopping for Pleasure at Ann Summers. Oxford: Berg. Amazon
Ann Summers is a UK brand of lingerie and sex toys, sold by brick-and-mortar stores, by online retailing and by a system of “Ann Summers parties”, in which saleswomen organize parties and directly market goods to the (all female) attendees. These goods include lingerie, sex toys, and related items. In particular, they sell bondage cuffs, light impact implements and other BDSM equipment. The Ann Summers parties are a point where “the rubber meets the road”, where people (i.e. hetero, vanilla women) have their first direct contact with BDSM toys, and the concept of BDSM play in general. Merl Storr’s book, based on interviews with party hosts and participant observation, presents valuable insights into how vanilla/hetero identities can change to accommodate the purchase of BDSM gear, if not the actual use of such.
Hooven, Valentine. 1997. Tom of Finland: his life and times. New York: St Martin’s Press.
One thing I’ve been curious about in the life of Touko Laaksonen, better known the world over as Tom of Finland, is did he participate in BDSM?
Hooven’s 1993 biography explores the deeply closeted, all-male, outdoors world that formed Laaksonen’s sexuality. There were a handful of bars and cafes in 1940s and 1950s Finland that catered to gay men, but they upheld a culture of effeminacy he didn’t care for. (Hooven makes the point that the “queen” stereotype was a way of asserting gay identity publicly in decades past.) His way to be gay was to partake in furtive, anonymous, nighttime encounters in parks, bus stations and the like.
A few months ago, I perused the used books section at Vancouver’s venerable queer bookstore Little Sisters. In addition to a book on Kenneth Anger’s underground gay leather film Scorpio Rising, I happened across a book without a barcode or copyright date or even an author, titled The Female Disciplinary Manual. I had heard of this before and remembered something about it being connected with some kind of schoolgirl discipline fantasy operation. As it was only $9.00 Canadian and in excellent condition with dust jacket (copies on Amazon are priced at $148 or more), I snapped it up.
The book itself is a rather odd work, purporting to be from the 2030s when the school disciplinary regime of the early 20th century in England has been reinstated as the solution to a decadent culture. The prose is in an arch, deadpan tone that leaves the reader guessing how much of this is part of the school discipline fantasy and how much is sincere.
By happenstance, I also came across the strange story of the organization that wrote and published the book and apparently lived by its ethos. The fifty-year saga links into pagan cults, lesbian separatists, Victorian-Edwardian cosplay as a lifestyle, early text-only video games, the English schoolgirl-discipline fetish, and far-right politics.
Stein, Stephen K. 2021. Sadomasochism and the BDSM community in the United States: kinky people unite. New York : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group
Stein’s first chapter, which attempts to describe the proto-BDSM culture of the early and mid twentieth century, is a necessarily scattershot collection of data points. Research any historical field long enough and the gaps in the record become clear. We know so little about the sadomasochistic subculture prior to the 1970s. There’s some data about the gay subset, precious little about straights, and practically nothing about lesbians. Stein had access to the Kinsey Institute, the Carter Johnson Leather Library, the NLA Archives and more, and even then he couldn’t shed any new light on American BDSM before 1970.
Stein treats the BDSM culture as a whole, whereas I think it is more accurate to describe it as three parallel but separate streams (gay, lesbian, and straight), each with their own economy, and culture, that occasionally influence each other.
Gates’s book is an exploration of a particular phase in Western sexual history. This is the pre-Google, pre-Facebook, pre-Fetlife Internet, when finding people who shared your kink was more a matter of luck and word-of-mouth than just typing something into a search bar. The people Gates interviews are an assortment of eccentrics who put their kinks out in early Internet forums, self-published newsletters, magazines and videos. Most of these media channels are hobbies and labours of love; a few attain the level of cottage industries that might break even some day. Some might even be seen as a kind of outsider art, fascinating precisely because of their lack of commercial slickness.
The why of fetishes has puzzled sexologists and psychologists since the concept was developed. Is there some deeper symbolic meaning to a fetish, or is it just a matter of a person randomly imprinting on a particular stimulus? Gates’ approach is primarily anthropological, not psychological, but she still tries to decode some fetishes.
People like to say that there are no new kinks under the sun, but the balloon fetish proves them wrong. Every era seems to have a fetish that is uniquely their own, and there’s something so post-modern/pop culture/McDonaldsTM/VH1 about balloons that the idea of eroticizing them feels particularly contemporary. […] It makes sense that the balloon fetish is such a new thing; after all, rubber latex toy balloons were not even invented until the 1920s, and have only been a routine part of the American suburban home since the 1950s. And although there exist looners as old as 70 years of age, most balloon fetishists are in their twenties and thirties. It’s really a baby-boomer and Gen-X phenomenon.
Pg.74-5
Many of the fetishists interviewed cite some childhood experience as the moment of recognition of their kink, such as seeing something in a seemingly innocuous film or TV show. E.g. the scene in the 1971 Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory in which a girl blows up into a sphere is well known to body inflation fetishists. However, most don’t see those moments as causing their kinks.
The first time Inflate 123 say the film at the age of five he cried inconsolably. […] By the third time that he saw it he just shut up, stared, and kept his fascination to himself. “It was the first external ‘proof’ of the concepts that were already swimming around in my head.”
Pg.99
A giantess fetishist has a similar belief, that such moments only catalyze or activate something that already existed in the person.
Ed [Lundt] doesn’t think that seeing growth stories in his childhood caused him to be a giantessophile, however. “I think that somewhere in the soup of one’s subconscious all these elements are floating around and the trigger just acts like a magnet drawing iron filings together. I starts to form a thing, and as you get older you see Village of the Giants, and it forms even more. When you hit puberty, you add on the sexual aspect and then it becomes the sex fantasy.” Ed feels that people become macros because of a combination of genetics and circumstances.
Pg.117
Twenty years later, it’s clear that Gates was definitely thinking ahead.
The sexual conversation is changing, and it’s changing rapidly. With the desktop publishing revolution and the advent of the internet, millions of people have suddenly gained access to previously unavailable information about non-conformist sex. New erotic communities are forming every day. Deviants with the most obscure and specific kinks — who always thought they were alone in the world — can now communicate with likeminded poeple.
Pg. 11
Today on Internet porn sites like Clips4Sale, you will find media catering to a mind-boggling variety of hyper-specific fetishes. Nonetheless, it is interesting to look back at this era, when the sexual frontier was charted and settled by people following their bliss, not bent on making money by exploiting a niche fetish.
