That he continues to do this thirty years on, still using the same rough aesthetic of sexual caricature, situation-comedy, and magic-markers, that he survives as the most overtly subversive gay artist in erotic comics, in porn, in art, is truly remarkable achievement. Kirwan and his dirty pictures have survived AIDS, political-correctness, the death of print porn, and the mainstreaming of gay erotics. All but alone among his contemporaries, Kirwan is still drawing sex like it was something to be enjoyed rather than celebrated, still drawing sex with it's dirty socks on, in hideously decorated rooms, on hopelessly dirty sheets, sex without benefit of clergy, or the sanction of assimilation. Sex is what Kirwan is all about. Romance is certainly possible in a Kirwan drawing -- and some of his finest efforts capture the moment just before, or even the languorous suspension after coitus -- but sex is the scene, and excitement the point of it all. That makes what Kirwan does a radical act, still. By keeping sex as the focus of his art, whether he means to or not, whether the decision was motivated by commercial demand or philosophic or political conviction, Michael Kirwan argues for an older, less civilized, less homogenized and acceptable understanding of what it means not so much to be gay, as to have gay, glorious, often gritty sex. For Michael Kirwan, it's still about fucking. Hallelujah!
I first saw his stuff in Stroke Magazine, aka "the Rolls Royce of Masturbation Manuals"; a glossy publication that, at it's best in the early Eighties, set the standard for well-made gay porn. The whole enterprise tended to narrative forms: "true" stories and letters, reader-submissions, photo-spreads that often as not, told a story -- admittedly, a pretty primitive, politically unenlightened story, but a story none the less. It was all unapologetically dirty-minded, occasionally appalling, and frankly, exciting as Hell. Remember, this was before the Internet made porn-stars of us all, when male nudity, let alone actual erections, let alone actual depictions of gay sex, were all strictly regulated by pretty regressive standards of indecency, in even the most progressive places. (To say nothing -- yet -- of the insipid West Hollywood aesthetic of hairless, steroid-fed beefcake already coming to dominate gay porn.) Stroke Magazine represented, as the more underground and intellectually respectable, Straight to Hell, The Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts, had before it, a direct challenge to the bland, comparative acceptability of mainstreamed gay porn. Even then, even in Stroke, Michael Kirwan's drawings could be startlingly filthy -- in a very good way, let me just say.
Nowadays, there are all sorts of gay writers and artists making all sorts of illustrated sex, online and off: from classically formatted comic-strips to romantic graphic novels, from slick SF/F comicbooks to amateur slash. Some of this stuff is remarkably well done, professionally produced and handsomely packaged. (I suspect that software may be more involved than not, but can't be bothered just now to find out.) Some of this stuff is beautiful. Some of it is also exciting. Most of it, for me at least, isn't.
Even back in the days of pencil and pen, there was often a weird uniformity of face and physique to the specifically pornographic gay comics. In fact, this might by now constitute a kind of tradition, dating back at least as far as Tom of Finland, and through him to his many heirs and pupils, most obviously, another prominent artist in the old Stroke Magazine, Hun. Not to say either gentleman wasn't expert at what he did, or that what they did wasn't exciting, but that repetitious type; hulking masculine exaggerations with heavy brows and square chins, can get, for me at least, more than a little wearisome. Even back in the day, I used to wonder how Tom of Finland's avatars, Kake & Co., never managed to encounter a single guy under six feet in the whole on Central Park. My own tastes tend to the Catholic. I prefer variety, not just of type, but expression. I'm pretty much with Terence:
Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.
I'm a gay man of a certain age and (almost) nothing men do together to get off is alien to me, if I may paraphrase poor Terence very loosely indeed. We all have our limits of course: kids and a certain sort of mess being the most obvious of mine, but what I've never liked, in men, art or porn is bland conformity. As mentioned above, it was the shaved muscle-head who was already dominating gay porn, print and video, back when I first had access in the early Eighties. By the Nineties, when I had, as it were, traced the source of the porn Nile in my brief time in West Hollywood, I was already heartily sick of the denuded gym-bunny. I actually met porn performers and makers during that time. It was an education in just how much influence one or two talented drag queens and a couple of Beverly Hills panders could have over a whole generation of gay men. It was also a lesson in just how boring and imperfect up-close a certain standard of hyper-masculinity can be, even to one who's just watching it walk by. There really is but so much muscles, cologne and hair-care can do to mask sexual-insecurity, drug-addiction and shoulder-acne. To each his own, though, naturally.
Since that time, particularly in GLBTQ comics, there has been a coming of age that has allowed for a new diversity, as well as a degree of artistic experimentalism and seriousness of purpose that would have been hard to imagine back in the day. (I remember when Howard Cruse's brilliant graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby was still such an unheard of object as to defy categorization in most bookstores.) Now there are books as unlike as wordless, erotic bear comics, to regular online funnies, and yes, even an artist who seems to specialize in photo-realistic depictions of adult-baby-play. (Add that to my list of exclusions, if you would.) What at least the more mainstream of these efforts seem to have in common, again, is a kind blankly handsome cast of relatively well-scrubbed, gay gentlemen, interacting in a setting of clean, architectural illustration. It can all look terribly... tidy.
What makes Michael Kirwan so special has always been, in part, his refusal to homogenize his subjects, or clean up after them. Neither the artist nor his subjects would seem to conform to any standard of beauty, taste or political sensitivity. If the man himself has a type, I neither know nor care, because as an artist, he celebrates the whole grand, sometimes ghastly panoply of queer fucking. I don't know that there's an act between two or more consenting adults that Kirwan hasn't drawn. Even more exciting to me personally, I don't know that there's a type, a face, a body, hair-color or length, race or disability that hasn't, sooner or later shown up in one of his sketches. (His predilection for the sprung sofa, the airless walk-up, and the clear violation of public-space, suggests a distinctly urban sensibility, though he's perfectly happy, it seems, to lube up the occasional rube in the barn, presumably upon request. He also has what would appear to be a peculiarly strong memory of, if not an almost eroticized fetish for hideous wallpapers, patterned rugs and the fringed lampshades of an earlier, uglier era. Realistically though, I suspect this is all just a way of entertaining himself in patterns while still producing gloriously pornographic pictures.) What matters most in Kirwan though is the heterogeneity of homosexual desire.
It is that last that makes what Kirwan does -- still -- a remarkably radical act. Even as gay culture and sexuality has fragmented into a dizzying and frankly sometimes rather tedious specificity, alternating with a bland standard of supposedly relateable wholesomeness, Michael Kirwan has continued to draw any damned thing he wants, from twinks to nuts, one might say, and all of it, for all his witty caricature and irrepressible humor, is sweaty, smelly, masturbatable fun. (To coin a phrase.)
His technique, while still recognizable from first to last, has evolved, even if his tools remain pretty much the same as they must have been from nearly the beginning: markers, paper and roughs, eventually fleshed out into unusually, even dizzyingly colored scenes of delightful depravity. His line has become much more self-assured, often less busy than in his earlier experiments, specially in drapery, and effects of realistic light and shadow on clothes, cloth, the detritus surrounding a damp mattress on a dirty floor -- though he still can get a little lost in a wrinkled sheet. Here again, he still loves color almost for color's sake, but in his more recent work, there is an almost Romantic fascination with twilight, and specifically the artificial twilight of urban street-lights, the green glow of the television on flesh, on rendering accurately the sometimes hallucinatory effect of sexual congress in the false dark of modern life.
His anatomy has always been both cartoonish and utterly convincing. He likes a Popeye bicep as much as the next guy, but he's equally happy with a beer-gut and bow-legs. His bodies are never flawless, anymore than ours are, and he makes the intercourse of flesh with flesh every bit as deliciously awkward, as brutal and tender as it is with real elbows and knees getting in the way. It is a rare thing indeed to capture both the excitement and the absurdity of sex. Kirwan does this by exaggerating not just where gay cartoonists and pornographers always have, but where nature tends to more often as well; like the unfeeling Gods themselves, Kirwan is shameless in distributing large noses and wall-eyes, crooked teeth and burst-blood-vessels, beautiful smiles and weak chins, great cocks and flat asses. It works, both as humor and porn, because it is fundamentally democratic, both in spirit and execution. Ugly guys can be hot, handsome body-builders can be bottoms, old men and sylph-like twinks can have huge dicks, fat guys can be dynamite in bed, and angels can be dirty lil' fuckers, once they drop their blushes.
It is an animal sensuality, of an almost Roman indifference to discrimination, that distinguishes Kirwan's work from almost any other artist in the form. These are no idealized, interchangeable archetypes of masculine beauty, figured and endlessly reconfigured in ever more complicated combinations, as in Tom of Finland and his imitators. Neither are they the blandly, cleanly realistic gay men of most contemporary erotic comics. Kirwan's men are stinky beasts, most of 'em. They smell of sweat, and unwashed feet. They needn't be kind or careful of their partner's pleasure. They can be sweet or silly, or all but unconscious, but they all glow with genuine heat, with a pulse, with the unmistakable excitation of sex, with all it's rough textured fumblings, with the slick, sticky fusions of flesh and friction.
(I would post pictures here, but I don't want to frighten the horses any more than I may have done already. instead, I'll simply suggest that anyone interested should visit Kirwan's website. His work is available for purchase there as well.)
Michael Kirwan matters. He matters because what he makes still has the power to offend as well as excite, to make the viewer laugh, as well as get him off. Kirwan is, in many ways, a throw-back to the heady days of Liberation, and the fundamental principles of sex as an act outside the purview of simplistic moral judgements, respectability and the conventions of modern gay romance. What Kirwan does defies the definition of kitsch, of taste and vulgarity, and tidy delineation of art and porn. Michael Kirwan, bless him, is the last true pornographer.
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