Just before Henry Darger died in 1973, his landlords visited his Chicago apartment to find that their tenant—a bachelor janitor in his 80’s—had quite a hobby. Darger amassed thousands upon thousands of pages of drawings and prose. A biography, a book of poems based on his drawings, a documentary film and several museum and gallery shows later, time has proven Darger’s mass appeal. Besides the quality of the work, enthusiasts love him for his tenacity: He’s a hero to those who find a touristic pleasure in the obsessive archivist’s pursuits. Solitude, once dissolved by an adoring public, becomes known as outsider art, and this title adds to the cornucopia of stardom, creating a frenzy with an inevitable willful ignorance. While we often think of Darger as a sexually naïve little genius, we neglect to remember that he spent his time drawing hermaphroditic children. Alford Lawrence, another outsider Chicago artist, is on the verge of similarly weird/perilous/perverse stardom. His work—about 3,000 hole-punched and bound drawings, their negative space often filled with lines and lines of erotic prose—is that of a true student of fetishism and sexual identity. Like his predecessor, he often couches his work in the exploration of sexual fantasy and gender-bending. Yet there is less repression in Lawrence’s work than in Darger’s corpus, less psychology and apology needed, and more humor and overt sex. Furthermore, unlike Darger, Lawrence’s obsession was not just with children.

Lawrence died in 2005, and at this time little is known of him. What we do know from his own notes and papers, is that short-statured Lawrence was born in October of 1927, served in the army and spent much of his life working at a gas station. There was an effort to re-dress his apartment after his death, and Salvage One, an antique seller and collector of architectural salvage, was contacted while a construction crew began throwing out his work. Steve Hruskocy and Don Schmaltz arrived to purchase the entirety of Lawrence’s life’s work for a nominal fee. Some were boxed and intact, but Hruskocy also pulled binders by the handful from a nearby dumpster. From there the work was stored, until Mariano Chavez, a Chicago artist who works at Salvage One (and a long-time contributor to RCM) took interest. He began the mammoth effort of cataloguing Lawrence’s oeuvre, and this undertaking has just begun.

Lawrence is distinctly in love with several of his recurring “characters.” For instance, there is a woman named Ana, who he dresses as a buxom nurse in some drawings, a nun in others. He frequently speaks of a black character that appears irregularly throughout his drawings as the “savage one.” This subject, Flora, is also a representation of Lawrence himself, or how he projects himself into his fantasy world. Lawrence was a transvestite, and he referred to Flora as his alter-ego, though she often appears in his drawings as a physical woman.

His drawing series are exhaustive studies of numerous sexual themes. One focuses on transsexuals wearing supernaturally sheer slips. Another, entitled “Breasts, good,” is an ambitious study of the female form, featuring a colloquy of his characters with renderings of engorged nipples bordering on the grotesque. In #10266,[1] Lawrence draws a woman’s face lost between two large, hairy, and milking breasts: “I had her right where she wanted me, flat on my back with my face between her huge firm soft black breasts.” In #4269, Lawrence draws two women, Ana and Delores, embracing in an open-mouthed kiss. His palette is that of a Disney film. Their fingertips arched in the confidence of their pleasure. They are dressed as nurses, but their clothes appear more like costumes than 9-to-5 garb. Around them float the tools of their trade, syringes and scalpels alike, suspended in black and white. A calendar, turned to “Mar,” dissolves into the background of this tender moment. The whimsy of Lawrence’s work is unquestionable, the sex exciting and liberated. The Lawrence suite is a well-manicured collection of one-handed fantasy.

Lawrence peppered his binders/catalogue with pornographic references. He looked to early editions of Playboy--to a time when the magazine displayed its women as sensual, fancy-free, and slightly removed from the real, with an airbrushed, painted look. He draws from old pornography to create better pornography. When Lawrence draws with his colored pencils, he creates a commercially illustrated aesthetic reminiscent of Merrie Melodies. And indeed, his subjects are Disney-like in their accomplished understanding of illustrated sexuality. Animated characters, like Ariel from The Little Mermaid (her almost entirely nude faerie tale representation maintained), and Jasmine from Aladdin (her midriff exposed from the top of her pubis to the bottom of her breasts), share a lingering innocence, but all are right on the cusp of sexual bloom. Lawrence fulfills this prophecy: His knowledge of how sexuality can be drawn out of such subtle eroticism is implicit.

This erotica can be lowbrow, even simplistic. In #43068, Lawrence draws a woman strongly embracing and leaning over a nun. They kiss, again open-mouthed. He surrounds his erotic image with prose: “Tongue on teeth…teeth on air, biting gently, unhurried, unashamed…hands, hands everywhere. Kisses, kisses & yet more kisses. Ardent kisses. Deep kisses.” Elsewhere on the page: “I felt the wetness of her.” Yet he is sentimental, betraying something of his fantasy fulfillment. But it must be remembered that in theory this Herculean task was meant for himself alone, and thus it is with utter abandon that he writes of his own fantasies. This was his private collection, where whomever he placed on the page was safe to be delivered into his imagined pleasures. But he can be good, in his way: He appreciates the sounds of the lexicon of erotica- “Ardent kisses. Deep kisses.” This determined urgency does well to illuminate these pages.

It is without question that these drawings show an artist who struggles to become better at his craft, playing with new mediums to illustrate his lust, perhaps even enjoying himself in the process.“Spiked Heels” 52469, for instance, shows the actual impressions of the stiletto on the page. One can only imagine him wearing these shoes, stamping on the page in a moment of playful expression. The work can also be almost solely perverse. In #41670 (two pages), Lawrence simply lays out his ideal fellatio scenario. Drawn sequentially, he maps his fantasies, pornographic citations next to several of these steps: “Mmmmm…licking…Sweet long tongue licking.” But he takes care to create a competency and panache in his female subject. She is a woman of the upper class. A string of pearls hangs from her neck. In his spare use of color he accents her lips with red, her earrings with green. He carefully applies gravity to her hair, her jewelry. With what appears to be cherry red lipstick, Lawrence draws rings around the penis to trace her presence, to add the sexual blush to her cheeks. Here is a man who does not secretly hate or disrespect his subjects. He is loyal to their pleasure. He is not defiling this woman, but delighting in the elegance of fellatio, in the satisfaction of the receiver. The acts he portrays are acts performed in confidence and freedom, and despite the bygone aesthetic of early animation and fantasy, he makes clear his intentions from the start.

Lawrence’s sexuality should be admired for its indulgence, not overlooked. He’s not hiding anything from himself. There is question as to whether Alford Lawrence’s work will ever see the light of day. There will be questions as to whether this man is actually an artist. We know now, that despite how tired we are of hearing about Darger, there is something edifying about peering into someone’s secret life--especially that of a horny artist. Lawrence’s collection is not just a stack of dirty magazines, or Vaseline films. Rather, it is a collection of drawings that display talent and scholarship. He is a student of art and a devoted fetishist, a horny profligate and an expert draftsman. Lawrence is good, a maker of inspiring and fascinating images. After all—outsider or no, pornographer or no—his drawings are expansive, tender, and concerned firstly with the fulfillment of their creator. This is not your big brother’s box of Hustler’s. This is the work of an artist, skilled at the realization of his own fantasy. Alford Lawrence was a pervert of the best kind.

[1] Among Lawrence’s novels, audiotapes, porn, reel-to-reels and memoirs are numbers that, when cross-referenced, match up to his work. He comprehensively annotates and titles his hundred-plus page drawing series in a careful hand. Hruskocy now believes that his numbering system was part of a vaster, lifelong cataloging project.