Does this project include photographs and films?
This is an even more hidden subject than mechanically printed matter. The
Kinsey Institute has material; some 25,000 photographs and 10,000 slides at
least (information from a brochure). All major research art libraries
should be checked (e.g., the Metropolitan in New York, Boston, Cleveland,
Chicago, the National Gallery in Washington, The Getty-especially the Getty
who are collecting in this area and purchased the photograph collection of
the boyfriend of Robert Mapplethorpe). See a book Cornog, Libraries, 188-93
for information on such libraries (a major resource incidently on erotica
in general).
Are any erotica photographers known from the US from the nineteenth
century? Erotic photographs are known from Paris from about the 1850s
(check out Pierre Charles Simart) and artists took them it seems in their
studios in a similar way to sketching nude models (the photographs were an
extension of this practice); Eadweard Muybridge in Great Britain and Thomas
Eakins in the US are relevant. There were links between the US and Europe.
Von Gloeden in Sicily in important. This area is only now attracting
research. Postcard sized erotic photographs seem to appear in larger
numbers from the 1890s in Paris.
(I have a future project which is An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Art;
it has 3, 700 entries drafted.)
Early erotic film needs urgent research. As member of Exlibris know, I hold
with Mckenzie (author of the Bibliographic Sopciety lecture What's Past is
Prologue) that film is a type of book.
Sorry about the mistake about Harlequin Prince Cherrytop; this work is in
poetry and I had not checked my database.
Paul Knobel
Author of Male Homosexuality and Auustralian English Language Poetry
(Sydney,19990
(contains 165 footnotes)