But it wasn’t until Bate’s Hollywood years that his sex life exploded.
Bate found work in California as an illustrator, then from 1936 settled in Hollywood, a designer on the fringes of the movie industry.Īs an adolescent, Bate had plenty of jack-off buddies. Bate abandoned studies when the Depression’s harshness forced him to search for employment. Talented at drawing from before he could talk, by high school his work was impressive enough to earn him a scholarship to the noted Cornish School. Bate’s earliest surviving work betrays a fondness for Depression-era farmboys his subjects retained a country flavor until the end. Neel’s family settled in the rural Seattle area shortly after.
My hope is that this show clinches Neel Bate’s reputation as a major figurative artist of the mid-20th Century (one whose work was also hot enough to melt tar) and rescues his artistic reputation from, yes, the ravages of time.Ĭarlyle Kneeland Bate was born in Canada on November 29,1916. The time is ripe for another revival of this shockingly under-recognized, under-appreciated artist and American original. That work is the basis of a landmark show of Blade’s work this fall (Nov.13-Dec.18) at the Foundation’s SoHo gallery. This includes more than two hundred finished drawings, preliminary sketches, a few file cabinets of edited typescripts and an eye-opening scrapbook of cropped cock shots. Since his death, his surviving work has been preserved at the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation. The guy lived long enough to produce into old age and in a time when his work could be rediscovered, openly shown, published, collected and appreciated. When I look at the strength of Bate’s surviving work and think of the hundreds of drawings destroyed, even all these years after the fact I feel sick at the loss to art and gay history.īate’s particular fairy tale has, if not a happy ending, at least a bittersweet one. In his lifetime unlucky Neel Bate faced, not once but three times, the willful destruction of much of his art. Possessing explicit gay fiction and pictures was criminally obscene, a punishable offense-worse yet to create them. During much of Neel Bate’s maturity, homosexual acts were outlawed and homosexuality was classified as a mental disease. Homoerotic art has had an especially tough time surviving until recently. The artwork, a physical thing, is itself subject to time’s erosions. The attempt of the artist to rescue something from time is, of course, impossible. More of Bate’s originals were destroyed than survive. Most of Tom’s original drawings still exist at the Tom of Finland Foundation or in other collections. By contrast, most of Bate’s early work, more explicit than Tom’s “public” work, was circulated, when at all, in poor, mimeographed, illegal copies. Lots of Tom’s work was published legally and has been republished to much-deserved acclaim. Tom has a Foundation dedicated to spreading knowledge and appreciation of his work. Tom’s icons are more instantly recognizable (and salable) than Bate’s real-life guys. There are reasons for Bate’s comparative semi-obscurity. Yet on Blade’s native continent, many fewer now know his name and work than know Tom’s. Though Bate’s work was more rooted in reality, in America it occupied a position similar to Tom’s. In the decades before Stonewall revolutionized gay life in 1969, and for a few decades after it, Tom created a whole pantheon of idealized, hyper-muscular icons of masculinity. For that success alone, Bate stands as one of the greatest of homoerotic artists, despite his relative obscurity since his death in 1989.Īnyone interested in hot and explicit gay art knows the name of Tom of Finland. Of all the artists who have toiled in the field, none has been more successful at rescuing something like sex itself from the passage of time than Neel Bate (1916-1989), also known as Blade. When an artist comes close, he deserves our gratitude, and his art deserves our attention.Īn unbroken tradition of explicit homoerotic art in our society is only a few generations old. The act is too immediate, rooted in too many senses and in different psyches, invested by humans with too much freight for it to ever be adequately captured on a single sheet. Of all human acts, none would seem more resistant to preservation than sex, that messy, exalted, degrading, physical and psychological interchange between two human beings (or, on occasion, among more). The futility of that task lends even the silliest art a shred of nobility and dooms even the greatest to failure.
I’ve sometimes thought the basic motive behind most art is the artist’s desire to rescue something he holds important from the depredation of time.