"Leather boot and desire" © 1966 by Mark I Chester

You probably think this is just a bunch of sex photos. But you're wrong. This is an anguished cry from the alleyways of San Francisco's mythic South of Market, where so much cum has been showered on the ground that strange flowers grow thru the broken pavement. (Ok, so I came out in the library stacks.<grin>)

To uptight moralists my work is perverted pornographic shit but to me these images are like pools at midnight reflecting waves made up of the moments of my life overflowing with unbearable quantities of love, sex and grief. A kind of dark explicit photographic diary. er.... ah... not to mention the fact that I'm obsessed by hard dicks. (blush)

But synchronicity connected this work to Sen. Jesse Helms. Helms created legislation that banned the NEA from supporting artists or institutions exploring issues around sexual art - which Helms defined as *obscene or lewd art.* For Helms, that meant any art that was explicitly sexual, homosexual or radically sexual.

And since my photographs were (and are) sexual, homosexual and radically sexual, it is the perfect example of the kind of work Helms considered so dangerous that it had to be banned by law from governmental support. Some people just have all the luck. <evil grin> But in a way it's also a compliment. Helms is right. My work is dangerous. Because the truth is *always* dangerous.