Continuing my discussion of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the function of violence, here’s the Room 101 scene from the American 1956 film version.

Note that the story pretty closely follows the book and the other two film versions: the electric shocks, the “How many fingers?” routine, Winston seeing his degraded self in the mirror. You can see how much of a perverse initiator O’Brien is (called O’Connor in this adaptation), guiding Winston room to room, preparing him for each stage of his descent into hell.

While the 1954 version shows the rat device, but doesn’t actually put Winston in it, and the 1984 version with John Hurt does put him in it, this version uses the same basic fear but in a different configuration. O’Connor shoves Winston into Room 101, which is divided into to two by a wire mesh, with the rats on the other side. A panel begins to lift and release the rats onto Winston, who is not strapped down but is confined by the room.

The shot is composed as if the rat cage is directly over Winston’s face, which taps into the same sense of directness as the other versions, even though the way the room is set up the rats (a swarm, instead of one or two) are more likely to swarm over him than go directly towards his face.

Winston, once again, says, “Do it to Julia!”, and is released from the room, and collapses sobbing into O’Connor’s arm. Note that in the 1954 and 1984 versions, Winston screaming “Do it to Julia!” is the climax and the end of the scene, and then it goes directly to the Chestnut Tree cafe scene. In this version, we get O’Connor’s acceptance of the broken Winston.

In the 1954 version, merely showing the apparatus to Winston (and by extension to us, the audience) is enough, but in the 1956 version, Winston has to be alone in the room with the rats. The absence of overt control like the bondage straps or the chair are an interesting wrinkle, allowing Winston to voluntarily draw closer to the rat cage in horrified fascination.

There’s also an element of isolation in this version not found in the others. Winston is along in the room with the rats, with O’Connor/O’Brien outside, instead of O’Brien being in direct control of the rat apparatus. This enables O’Connor to act as a “good cop”, literally welcoming Winston with open arms once he leaves the rat room, even though O’Connor is in control of the whole situation. The idea that O’Brien manipulates Winston through reward as much as punishment is in the source material and the other filmed versions.

As far as I can tell, there wasn’t the same outcry over depictions of violence in the US over this film as there were over the 1954 British verison. It may have had something to do with the difference between theatrical film and TV broadcasting, or just different standards regarding violence between the two societies at that time.

Stepping back a bit, public outrage over violence in the media links up to the ongoing debate about “torture porn” as a film genre. John Shirley, reluctantly a member of the “splatterpunk” horror sub-genre, recently wrote in io9:

…I’ve never written so-called “torture porn”, in prose or script. Several points sharply distinguish my writing from that sort, but the most obvious is the point of view; there’s always something salacious, something innately sadistic about “torture porn”, a subgenre that crouches in the point of view of the monster and never seriously departs from it. There’s something distinctly sociopathic about it. Movies like The Devil’s Rejects, the Japanese film Audition, the Saw movies, come to mind—they seem eagerly sadistic. The French film Martyrs may have some redeeming social meaning but ultimately it’s torture porn. At best “Torture porn” seems a steam valve for a pressure that should never have built up-and it never has a genuine message. More meaningful examples of extreme fiction and film expose sadism, or the brutal, dehumanizing absurdities of life, without losing a moral center.

I’m not sure I buy Shirley’s distinction, or rather, I don’t think it is functionally useful. Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four with a strong sense of moral and political outrage, and his unflinching depiction of violence and terror was intended to shock people. Plenty of people, however, did not see that in the 1954 TV show. To them it was just a sadistic spectacle with no redeeming social meaning, pure “torture porn.” You could go into fine points of discussion about all of the works cited by Shirley and discussed here, and you could find their defenders and attackers. There are also plenty of works intended as political speech employing shocking imagery that may be (mis)read as spectacle.

The line Shirley draws is a lot more blurry than he would probably like.

Vintage Sleaze has a fun tidbit of kink history. Sam Menning, an actor who also worked as a photographer, took fetish pics, including the great Betty Page.

Menning eventually became the “house” photographer of sorts for Gargoyle, a distributor of 4 x 5 nude photos with a fetish bent. Mind you, they were 1950′s photos of a fetish bent…which meant play-acting with rather dim and confused models being asked to look tough…dramatic to this day, but little more than lingerie ads with the models in black. Not MY cup of tea, but someone’s.

Meanwhile, Senator Estes Kefauver was gunning for porn publisher Samuel Roth, particularly for the fetish/kink pictures Kefauver thought were published by Roth.

It turns out that Kefauver and his puritan goons had confused Sam Menning, photographer for Gargoyle Sales Corp, with Samuel Roth, publisher of Gargoyle Books. This mistake wasn’t revealed until Kefauver had Roth on the stand testifying.

The Vintage Sleaze blog has the story behind the Fads and Fancies fetish magazine, published in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and its signature artist known as Janine, actually a woman by the name of Reina Bull.

The astounding drawings by an anonymous artist known only as “Janine” who drew work for the sleazy Utopia magazine “Fads and Fancies” a British fetish magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s.   The work is no longer anonymous. It was done by a woman all right, but Janine wasn’t her real name. Fads and Fancies was published by Utopia, who printed fetish material remarkably similar to Nutrix and Irving Klaw, and at roughly the same time.

[...]

Janine had an incredible, unique, eccentric and curious style likely developed to cater to the audience. Particular parts of the plump participants protrude depending on the proclivities she wished to portray. Which is an alliterated way of saying big boobs and big butts. Kinky and unreal, but then certainly enticing to the readers who must have been “big” fans (pun intended.) To the rest of us, they look hilarious…Dolly Parton on Steroids!   The work takes an “all-purpose” approach to fetishists.  The artist can not figure out if she is titillating a shoe fetish, a butt fetish, a fat fetish, a breast fetish, a stocking fetish…if the idea of a fetish is to focus on one particular object, there was something kinky for all in Janine’s curious drawings.  At the time, the fetish underground was not yet defined, but the publishers knew if they appealed to a handful of eccentricities, they would reach a market.

Fads belongs in a tradition of English fetish magazines that includes Photo Bits and London Life, and goes back at least to the 1870s when the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine took a turn for the pervy. The business model seems to be, “give the punters what they want”.

Nowadays, Rule 34 is in full effect and every fetish has its own Tumblr.

Researching the previous post led me to the Klaw Archives, focused on the Irving Klaw’s 1940s-1950s bondage photosets and short films.

According to a post on Vintage Sleaze, “Justin Kent” is a name that appeared on many American digests published in the 1950s, short novels with racy covers that promised more than they could deliver in terms of sex, bondage and sadomasochism. It was actually a pen name for an unsuccessful writer living in Harlem named Kenneth Johnson (possibly African American, but the record isn’t clear.) Johnson wrote at least ten digest novels, many with illustrations by Gene Bilbrew.

The Strange Empress by Justin Kent Collection Jim Linderman

Tracked down and rounded up by investigators working for the Senate who wanted to grill Eddie Mishkin, publisher of overpriced soft-core bondage fiction with sexy covers.  Kent’s story, and his real name, come to us courtesy the U.S. Government.

[...]

Justin could follow orders.  As the transcript to a Supreme Court ruling five years later reveals, Eddie Mishkin had specific instructions for his writers.  Mishkin “insisted that the books be full of sex scenes and lesbian scenes… the sex had to be very strong, it had to be rough, it had to be clearly spelled out.  I had to write sex very bluntly, make the sex scenes very strong. The sex scenes had to be unusual sex scenes between men and women, and women and women, and men and men.  He wanted scenes in which women were making love with women.  He wanted sex scenes in which there were lesbian scenes. He didn’t call it lesbian, but he described women making love to women and men making love to men, and there were spankings and scenes—sex in an abnormal and irregular fashion.”  Another unnamed author testified that Mishkin instructed him ‘to deal very graphically with the darkening of the flesh under flagellation.”

These books were made in limited print runs and frequently confiscated and burned, making them pretty rare today.

Woman Impelled by Justin Kent Collection Jim Linderman

Jay A. Gertzman’s article “1950s Sleaze and the Larger Literary Scene: The Case of Times Square Porn King Eddie Mishkin”, in eI15 fanzine, provides an intriguing glimpse into the proto-BDSM scene of 1950s America, particularly the previously mentioned publishing empire of Eddie Mishkin.

Mishkin employed fetish artists like Eric Stanton and Gene Bilbrew, as well as writers, some of whom wrote pornography under pseudonyms or house names to pay the bills while working on above-ground books or television.

One [of Mishkin's writers], who wrote under the name “Justin Kent,” was held as a material witness for over a month. Both he and a woman unfortunately named Leotha Hackshaw stated that Mishkin told them to write about “rough sex,” with “strong lesbian scenes,” “high heels,” “perfume fetishes,” “bondage,” etc. He lent Hackshaw texts on sexual deviations, including Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis,so that her stories focused on spanking, whipping, and the “weals” left in male and female flesh by violent foreplay. Many of the booklets were illustrated by the fetish artists Gene Bilbrew and Eric Stanton. In appearance, these publications suggested cheapness and unreliability, an impression reinforced by a five-dollar cover price for badly edited, cheaply produced, typewritten texts some of which were nicely illustrated, but with line drawings unrelated to the narrative itself. Sample titles were “Screaming Flesh,” “Return Visit to Fetterland,” “The Hollywood Spankers,” and “Sex Switch.” Newspaper reporters, prosecuting attorneys, and judges noted that the appearance as well as contents of Mishkin’s booklets epitomized “dirt for dirt’s sake,” with no purpose other than to appeal to prurience to make as much money with as little expense as possible.

It’s interesting is that Mishkin had his writers working directly from a five- or six-decade old work of sexology, and other academic or semi-academic texts, to write pornography. For Mishkin, Psychopathia Sexualis was market research, a list of readership requirements to fill. Compare that to how many fetishists searched through Krafft-Ebing’s book (and it’s many pirate editions) for validation of their own desires. That book cast a long shadow.

Mishkin put huge markups on the books he published, but he at least paid his contributors well.

He paid between $100 and $350 per story, according to testimony at the 1960 trial. For a single drawing, Gene Bilbrew, who did illustrations for covers, got $30 or $35, and Eric Stanton, for interior work, got $10 or $15. According to the Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index, $100 in 1959 would be the equivalent of almost $640 in today’s currency. All these deals were strictly in cash, which changed hands in one of Mishkin’s stores or in a bar called Dino’s on 42nd Street.

Mishkin’s contributors were also part of the NYC Bohemian subculture of the time, where you’d have CIA agents armed with LSD rubbing elbows with wife-swappers, writers, artists, models, prostitutes, homosexuals, lesbians, fetishists and the like.

At the same time a surreptitious Midtown fetish and S-M scene was active. A publisher and distributor named Lenny Burtman was at the center of it. He and his wife, model Tana Louise, hosted swinging parties in their apartment. Burtman and several associates financed the film Satan in High Heels [1962], many scenes of which were shot there.

Mrs. Burtman appeared in his digest-sized magazines such as Exotique, “a new publication of the bizarre and unusual.” Many copies were seized in police raids on Burtman’s warehouse in 1958. Exotique, and other Burtman publications, were classified as deviant because of the leather, high heels, and attendant fetishes, to which the publisher appealed with stories, advertisements, drawings, photos, and correspondence from enthusiasts. Times Square bookstores carried his fetish booklets and magazines extensively, and his distribution system was more far-reaching than those of Mishkin or of Irving Klaw (whose booklets featuring bondage and flagellation were as notorious as Mishkin’s). It is probable that both Bilbrew and Stanton attended Burtman’s parties, if only because both illustrated Burtman’s publications.

Gertzman, following the research of Robert Bienvenu, says that Burtman wasn’t merely in the queer/kink scene to make money, but viewed himself as part of it, contributing to a community.

Unlike them, he was not only supplying furtive men with images which excited them for reasons they did not care to explore, but also filling the needs of people actively pursuing radical, deeply tabooed sexual alternatives. Burtman was a businessman not a creative artist, but he provided materials and a setting for an innovative and liberating style of expressing tabooed libidinous needs.

http://efanzines.com/EK/eI15/#sleaze

Being Canadian, I’m always interested in Canada’s contributions to the sexual edge of culture. I was delighted to stumble across the story of Justice Weekly, a true crime tabloid newspaper published in Canada that frequently included fetish letters. “…popular topics were discipline, punishment and humiliation of males (especially ‘errant husbands’ and spoiled post-adolescent children) by authoritarian/domineering females, transvestites and authority figures such as school principals, judges and law-enforcement officials.”

From the Carter/Johnson Leather Library newsletter:

The Justice Weekly was an 8 ½ by 11, 16 page newspaper published in Toronto Ontario Canada and distributed across the United States. It had a publication run from 1964 [sic] to about 1972. What made the Justice Weekly unique was its content. The paper covered news that was, by and large, considered far to risqué or just plain sexual for others to print. If a man was arrested and found to be wearing his wife’s underwear, it was written about in the Justice Weekly. If a “bawdy house” was raided by the police, all the details were to be found in the Justice Weekly. Cross dressing, fetishism, S&M all had a prominent place in this newspaper and its bigger brother The Justice Monthly.

[...]

Running for the next three or four pages was a “Boy Meets Girl, Girl Meets Girl. Boy Meets Boy” section. I read through the pages of ads laughing at much of the wording. “Sincere couple seeks others interested in topics written in this newspaper”.

Allison Jacques at McGill university has already written a paper(PDF) on the tabloid, viewing it as a window into Canada’s queer/kink subculture in the postwar period. From her grant application:

Chapter 2 focuses on the letters to the editor published in Justice Weekly in the 1940s and early 1950s, which were concerned almost exclusively with corporal punishment. Specifically, the tabloid regularly printed long narratives of spankings given and received. A combination of textual analysis and historical research reveals that these letters are rooted in centuries-old erotic narratives of flagellation and, in fact, bear a close resemblance in both style and substance to stories and letters published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the recurring themes and motifs in the letters of Justice Weekly are nearly identical to those found in historical pornography, they also make a great deal of cultural sense when viewed in terms of postwar concerns about the Canadian family and the perceived threat of juvenile delinquency. This chapter suggests that [publisher and editor Philip H.] Daniels was able to link the spanking letters in his paper to a real postwar panic over juvenile delinquency, enabling him not only to attract readers with titillating content but also to portray Justice Weekly as a relevant and legitimate newspaper.

[...]

Particularly from the late 1950s, the personals in Justice Weekly dealt almost entirely with unorthodox sexual desires, including sadomasochism, fetishes, and swinging. Significantly, Justice Weekly‘s column functioned as a rare site where certain sexual subcultures were made visible. The tabloid was not the only source of kinky personal ads in the 1960s, but it was a pioneer in the genre as one of the earliest and most enduring sources. The aim of this chapter is, first, to locate Justice Weekly within a history of personal advertising in Canada (a history that is almost entirely unexamined) and, second, to explore the editorial strategies used by Daniels that allowed him to publish and promote the ads while also distancing his paper from the sexual communities represented therein.

It would be interesting to see the interest in spanking/domestic discipline as an anxiety/arousal response to fears about the breakdown of the traditional family and the rise of youth culture.

As discussed previously, there have been a long series of different publications that host fetish letters, going back as far as the 1860s with The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, and continuing into the 20th century with London Life and Fads and Fancies and Photo Bits. Note that the magazines with fetish letters are from several different genres: EDM was aimed at middle-class women, London Life at a men’s style audience, and Justice Weekly was true crime.

Vintage Sleaze has a post on Tana Louise, the premier fetish/bondage model before Bettie Page and girlfriend of bondage pioneer Lenny Burtman.

The post ends with stating that the 1940s/1950s porn/fetish/kink world is still largely unexplored:

There are thousands of untold stories from the golden days of sleaze, as this blog proves, and that there have been over 800 posts here already only indicates how many more are to be told.  Yet, from this writer’s perch, Tana Louise is the MAJOR untold story of the 1950s.  A story not even scratched.

My Retrospace has a gallery of spanking scenes from vintage American comics.

The examples are almost all male-dominant and female-submissive, and most make reference to parental discipline. I.e. that women are children and need to be disciplined by men.

Some examples even propose that because the woman wasn’t properly spanked when she was a child, she needs to be spanked now. Note that many of these scenes have third-part observers, or even take place in a public place where other people witness this disciplinary ritual.

I’m still interested in the theory that spanking and domestic discipline was big in the 1950s and 1960s of America because of anxiety about change in the family structure: fear of juvenile delinquency, fear of liberated women, fear of loss of male privilege. These scenes are a ritual of reaffirming the proper order, by an act that can easily be seen as a sublimation of sex.

There are a couple of example of female-female spanking, but these are in the same familial context.

Band of Angels (1957), dir. Raoul Walsh, wri. Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts IMDB Wikipedia

On the death of her father, Southern belle Yvonne DeCarlo finds out that her mother was one of her father’s slaves. That makes her his property too, and therefore is sold as part of his estate. She’s thrown in with a bunch of African slaves and put up for auction, before she’s rescued by Clark Gable for $5000.

This is the “passing-for-white woman in slavery” device, used in stories as diverse as Clotel and The Memoirs of Dolly Morton. It’s inherently dramatic and lends itself to both drama and erotica, as the protagonist is suddenly stripped of everything and thrown into a new realm, a transition between two different sexual economies.

The recurring figure of the beautiful woman who is both black and white, a highly liminal figure, has some troubling issues: it suggests that we (the presumably white audience) can only see how bad slavery is when it happens to a (passing for) white woman, who isn’t “tough” like a black woman. This is one of the many points of slippage between abolitionist media and exploitation.

Weighing in at 6,100 words, “The Velvet Underground” covers roughly 1945-1970, including the gay male leather culture; the fetish porn production business centered around NYC with artists like John Willie, Eric Stanton and Gene Bilbrew and models like Bettie Page and Tana Louise; and a little bit about the contact-service-based heterosexual kink scene. I would like to do more about the heterosexual scene as it existed then, but I just don’t have the references yet. Thus, the chapter is a little shorter and rougher than I would like.

I want to cover Story of O (1954), but it doesn’t fit in a chapter largely about American pulp porn. I may need to do a chapter about high literary kink porn, like O and The Image.

The other problem I have to face is I kind of skipped over the 1910-1945 period, apart from a few bits in the fascism chapter, and I don’t have enough material to make a strong theme for a chapter. It would be a grab bag/”and then…” chapter. Friends have counseled me that it is better to admit the limited availability of source material and cover what I can than just skip over it.

Next up is chapter 10, roughly 1970 to 1990, which covers the first aboveground kink organizations and the articulation of the kink ethos; the professionalization of the kink porn industry; the punk-kink dialectic; and the influence on the mainstream, such as fashion and movies like Nine and a Half Weeks.

I think that pushing forwards to a complete draft by the end of the year might be feasible, but it has other values in that it shows me areas I need to research, and just having something I could show to prospective publishers with the caveat “It needs some work.”

After the war, a generation of men returned home to peacetime. Whether due to awakened homosexuality in the all-male society of the military, or just a distaste for the new American dream of job and family, many of these men created an alternative culture that continued the outdoor homosociality and initiatory experience of military life.

Samuel M Steward describes his early life in S/M before there was a Scene:

…in the 1930s, I had become interested in S/M [….] In those days there were no leather shops, no specialty stores; and leather jackets were unheard of and unavailable except in police equipment outlets that would generally not sell to civilians. I finally found my first one in Sears-Roebuck’s basement in Chicago. And I had unearthed– literally, for his saddlery shop was in a cellar on North Avenue– a little man who braided a few whips for me, and even found a “weveling” Danish cat-o’-nine-tails crocheted from heavy white twine, and located also a handsome crop of twisted willow wood.

My introduction to S/M had begun with my answering a personal ad in the columns of the Saturday Review of Literature, a weekly publication out of New York City. In those days some of the wordings and contents of the ads were mildly outrageous for the times, growing wilder until the publishing of them was entirely stopped by the guardians of our American purity. The one that caught my attention [in August 1947] ran something like:

Should flogging be allowed? Ex-sailor welcomes opinions and replies. Box…ⁱ

Answering that ad put Steward in touch with Hal Baron, a former sailor dedicated to connecting every S (sadist) with an M (masochist) he could, who connected Steward with other men who had answered the ad.ⁱⁱ

Steward, then a college teacher, was interviewed by the controversial Dr. Alfred Kinsey, and became an unofficial collaborator on Kinsey’s sexual research. The two men share an interest in sexuality and record keeping; Steward kept a comprehensive list of his many sexual encounters in his “Stud File”, often noted as “sadie-maisie” or “sad-mashy”.ⁱⁱⁱKinsey invented the term “S/M” (pronounced “ess-em”) as part of his group’s elaborate alphanumeric code for discussing sexual topics discretely. In 1952, Kinsey arranged a meeting between Steward and Mike Miksche, a freelance illustrator and erotic artist under the alias “Steve Masters”, as M (masochist) and S (sadist) respectively. Kinsey filmed this two-day encounter, the first homosexual encounter so recorded for the archives, as if documenting the mating habits of a rare species of lemur.^iv (The film was financed by funds earmarked for “mammalian studies.”^v)

Later in his life, Steward pursued many other men whom he hoped would be the “S” of his fantasies, often to great disappointment. Having to instruct the young hustlers sent by Chuck Renslow, Chicago-based publisher of beefcake magazines and owner of the Gold Coast leather bar, in how he was to be (mis)treated, Steward typed up a numbered “handout” which he had each new arrival read before the session. Titled “WHAT THIS PARTICULAR M LIKES”, it included instructions like “Please remember: his is your absolute slave” and “Piss in his mouth (a little, not too much…)” and “Give him a few whacks on the ass with your belt. Or use whip if one present.”^vi Like Sacher-Masoch, Steward’s desires were so insistent he wanted nothing left to chance.

When leatherman culture began formalizing in the late 1950s, the aging Steward couldn’t adapt. His ambivalence about other homosexuals made him solitary and antisocial, and he believed that his desire, for rough, working-class or criminal-class, heterosexual men and sex that was always on the brink of real violence, could not be domesticated. He wrote an essay called “Pussies in Boots”:

An artificial hierarchy, a ritual, and a practice have been superimposed over a very real need of the human spirit [to locate that which is authentically masculine]… [but] the entire affair has become a ritual, a Fun and Games sort of thing, and in essence there is no difference today between a female impersonator or drag-queen and a leather-boy in full leather-drag. Both are dressing up to represent something they are not…

It is difficult to say at what point in such a “movement” the degeneration sets in, and the elements of parody and caricature make their first appearance. Perhaps the decay began when the first M decided that he, too, could wear leather as well as the big butch S he so much admired. And so he bought himself a leather jacket…^vii

Foster. Richard. 1998. The Real Bettie Page: The Truth About the Queen of the Pinups. Carol Publishing Group.

I approached this book looking for information on the 1950s bondage picture and stag reel culture Page was a part of, when she was one of the most popular models working for Irving Klaw. I didn’t find anything I hadn’t already learned, and it left me as puzzled as I was before.

Bettie Page as the Dark Angel

Bettie Page was, undeniably, a beautiful woman with a curvaceous body and a megawatt-intensity smile. She was neither an intimidating vamp nor a vulnerable girl-woman like Marilyn Monroe. Even in the Irving Klaw bondage and fetish shoots and loops, she could look like she was having fun. Her heavy black bangs became an icon.

Like fellow early Playboy Playmate Marilyn Monroe, Page’s modelling career abruptly ended, but with a mysterious disappearance instead of a tragic suicide. A few claimed she had been killed by the mob, but most agreed she was still alive, with stories ranging from having a husband and kids to doing missionary work to living in a mental institution.

Page, the image, attained a kind of mystique far beyond any flesh and blood woman. She became Marilyn Monroe for hipsters, a sex symbol and style icon, forever frozen in her prime with her black bangs. She both harkened back to the days of Vargas Girls and gestured forward to the modern fetish subculture. Yet she herself was a mystery, never a speaking subject. What did a woman who had been molested by her father as a girl, and had done missionary work in Haiti, and was a near tee-totaller and part-time school teacher, think of her iconic status as the queen of bondage?

Foster’s book endeavours to tell Page’s full life, but this is an unauthorized biography. The only direct contact Foster had with Page was a single letter she sent him before he started on the book. Nearly all of the material is from second and third hand accounts, and some of them are a bit suspect.

There’s also two areas where I think Foster went beyond journalism into exploitation.

The first is documenting Page’s descent into paranoid schizophrenia. This is something far too many people suffer through, and Page’s story was mostly just sad. Her authorized biography says that she lived with her brother for 9 years, but Foster asserts she was wandered from place to place and was eventually institutionalized after she became violent. Foster’s excruciatingly detailed reconstructions of Page’s supposed outbursts don’t do any good to her or the people she allegedly assaulted. Not all stories need to be told in gory details.

The second is the legal squabbling over Page’s likeness and legacy and the money they generated. Foster’s unauthorized work, which has been criticized by Page fans for inaccuracies, is just another attempt to cash in on her.

I’m tempted to say that Foster’s book ultimately fails in that it doesn’t deliver any real insight into who Page was, or why she did the things she did. However, Page’s life is so opaque that I can’t really blame him for that. The real Bettie Page remains such a shadowy figure, rarely photographed and only giving the occasional audio tape or letter, that even the more unlikely scenarios seem plausible, like the claim that the woman glimpsed in the 1990s is actually an imposter.

So what did Page think of her career as fetish queen? It’s hard to say, as Page herself was notoriously reclusive. Was she a good Christian girl, damaged by childhood abuse, who wandered into a scene that exploited her, or was she a tigress with an eye for young muscular men and who loved the spotlight? There are rumored to be certain hardcore shots of her, which she later claimed all came from a single night of drunkeness in an otherwise sober life. [See Pg.137] She also said she hated the raunchier pictures of her smoking.

The most plausible account in Foster’s book actually comes from J.B. Rund, a publisher, expert on erotica, and who was briefly Page’s agent in 1996. [Pg. 135-136] He said that Page’s seven-year modelling career and her forays into Hollywood were just a minor diversion on a life devoted to Christian faith and academic study.

…Rend says that he found Bettie’s take on the picture, particularly the Klaw Bondage photos, to be innocent and “naive.”

“She said, ‘Irving used to get suggestions from his customers as to what kind of photos they wanted to see. A lot of Irving’s customers liked me with a ball gag in my mouth.’ Very matter of fact,” Rund recalls.

“I realized right then and there that she doesn’t understand any of this. She doesn’t understand foot fetishism or bondage. I said, ‘Bettie, does it ever occur to you that guys are masturbating over these photos?’ and she says, ‘Yeah, I guess so,’ you know, like it doesn’t matter. She had no understanding of any of this.

“She said to me she thought it was funny. She does not understand that people get erections from it. Her sexual interests are very normal. Bettie still drinks milk.”

He says, “The thing is, she really doesn’t have anything revealing to say about her work. She went there and posed and that’s it.” [Pg.172-173]

Is that it? So many of the men who reminisce about Page talk about her as innocent, as pure. Page wasn’t a fool; many of the men described her as intelligent and well-informed. Perhaps Page was playing another role, one that she understood her fans wanted. Was Page retroactively revising her own biography as she lived it?

Her fan club president, Steve Brewster, who has met her, said:

“She’s a very devout Christian lady,” Brewster says. “She takes her religion very seriously. We’ve had some discussions about it. She’s not ashamed of her past. She said she does not feel guilty then or now. She has a very positive attitude about her career. She thinks those sever or eight years she modeled were kind of a time in her life when she was kind of lazy. The time period we think of as the Golden Age of Bettie Page, to her, she kind of kicked back in New York and made a few dollars modeling. She left New York and went to Bible college and started her real career.[“] [Pg. 174]

Perhaps Page was such a recluse before her death was because if she went into the public eye, she would have to express some kind of opinion about her career as a model. She’d either have to repudiate it or champion it; either way, it would define her life, and obscure anything else.

GENE BILBREW REVEALED: The Unsung Legacy of a Fetish Art Pioneer (African American Artists Series) is the latest in Richard Pérez Seves’ series of biographies of fetish artists and publishers.

Pérez Seves’ previous work on Eric Stanton gave an interesting picture of a man, his work and his time. However, the author has less to work with when it comes to Gene Bilbrew.

Arguably, Bilbrew and Stanton defined the American fetish style in the 1950s and 1960s, drawing and painting numerous comic strips, digest magazines and pulp covers for semi-underground publishers. They both went to Cartoonists & Illustrators School in NYC (along with Steve Ditko). They maintained a rivalry that was not always friendly, competing for work from a limited number of publishers.

While Stanton left behind a legacy of creator-owned work, family members, friends and interviews, Bilbrew was a cipher, an African-American in a business and a subculture dominated by whites and Jews.

Even why Bilbrew started doing fetish art is a mystery. Stanton was interested in bondage, fighting women and the like from adolescence, a fan who turned pro, but there’s no evidence Bilbrew had any interest in kink or graphic arts. As a young man, Bilbrew enjoyed some success as a singer in several vocal groups under the name “Gene Price”, and married another singer known as Rosita Davis. His career and marriage came to an end in the early 1950s. There’s no hard evidence on how or why Bilbrew went into art at this point, even working for comics great Wil Eisner. As Stanton recalled, he spotted Bilbrew working on a bondage scene illustration on his desk, and that led to Stanton introducing him to the Klaws and the bizarre underground.

Bilbrew didn’t stay within the Klaws’ strict rules about nudity and explicit sexuality in the work they published. The Klaws ordered Stanton to censor Bilbrew’s work, starting a rift in their relationship. Bilbrew moved into the orbit of other underground publishers such as Edward Mishkin, working under aliases like “Eneg”, “Van Rod” or “Bondy”.

One of the few direct quotes from Bilbrew about his work came from when he was called as a witness in one of Mishkin’s trials for obscenity.

Bilbrew: … I, more or less, learn the psychology of the type of work, what’s appealing–

Justice Gassman: But you didn’t read the book. How did you know that the cover was going to fit the book?

Bilbrew: Actually speaking, I didn’t.

Justice Gassman: You just made a cover without knowing whether it fitted the book or it didn’t fit the book?

Bilbrew: That’s the way I have been working.

Pg.100

In the 1970s, changes in the industry combined with Bilbrew’s alcohol and drug use left him in a sorry state, with declining work and living in a small room in the back of one of Mishkin’s businesses. The exact cause and location of his death in 1974 is not clear, and he left behind no obituary or grave marker. Stanton’s widow, Britt, says Eric wept when he learned of Gene’s death.

Was Bilbrew like Stanton, whose kinks drove his art? Or did Bilbrew just happen to find a field of art that would offer him better work than he, a black man, would get in other businesses? These questions will probably remained unanswered.