Never say that Queerguru doesn’t ever think of helping expand your horizons or futures as today we have an excellent possibility for helping create some real culture in your future.

The Bob Mizer Foundation is offering you the opportunity to be a publisher. They need help in publishing Harry Bush: His Art and His Life: its a long-overdue book about a well-known, unknown gay American artist.  Illustrations and paintings by American artist Harry Bush (1926- 1994) are among the most recognizable from 20th-century gay art. Since 1965, his drawings have appeared in magazines, publications, and online, continuing to delight, amuse, and shape gay visual culture. A self-taught, outsider artist, he is also one of the least-documented artists of his generation. Many know his iconic, joy-filled images. Very few know the man behind them.

Having begun his artistic career at age 40, after 20 years in the military, Harry began his career in the mid-1960s in Bob Mizer’s landmark publication, Physique Pictorial. Harry’s work is full of humor and irony, and definitely sexy. Through the discovery of hundreds of letters, his writing reveals a man who was shy, withdrawn, and unsure of his place in the artistic and cultural landscape of his time as well as within the gay community around him.

Harry, however, had a darker side – often withdrawn and reclusive, he rejected the gay culture he found and on several occasions nearly destroyed all of his artwork.

Working with the archival collections at the Bob Mizer Museum and Photographic Archives – the organization housing the largest collection of Harry’s artwork and papers, Leather Archives & Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Tom of Finland Foundation, GLBT Historical Society, Bishopsgate Institute, and ONE Archives, the co-editors have amassed hundreds of letters written by – and to – Harry. Primary original research has been conducted on over 2,000 pages of material which have been processed and analyzed.

What emerges is a complex portrait of an American artist whose psyche was shaped by a simultaneous thirst for visibility and isolation. Having served in WWII, he worked at the Pentagon in the 1950s, living in Washington during the Lavender Scare. In the mid 1960s, he moved back to Southern California determined to be an artist and part of “the gay community.”  The book will  explore gay history in those heady, sex-positive, anything-goes years after the Stonewall uprising, and the explosion of gay magazines which were a lifeline for so many people.

For decades, Harry Bush was known through his images. In this book, his story will be told in his own words. “Harry Bush – His Art and His Life” is not only a monograph of an artist’s work, but it is also the reconstruction of a voice long missing from the history of 20th-century American queer visual culture. And don’t worry – none of the gluteal clefts will be blurred!

YOU CAN MAKE A CONTRIBUTION VIA KICKSTARTER HERE TO ENSURE THE BOOK GETS PUBLISHED