Portfolio

A late-life, artist-authorized collection of drawings by REX (1943–2024), the famously secretive American illustrator whose pointillist pen-and-ink images of leathermen, hustlers, and rough trade defined the graphic idiom of gay S&M culture alongside Tom of Finland and Etienne.

Portfolio was issued under REX's own imprint, REX Publications, whose web storefront at rexbooks.press offered a small program of print-on-demand editions in 2022–2023 — Rough Trade, Leather Cult, Posters and Portraits, and reissues of the bound portfolios Männespielen and ICONS among them. Listed in the imprint's "standard edition collection," this US-letter-format paperback compiles images from the unbound 8-by-10-inch portfolios (Rexwerk, Uncut, Undercover, Armageddon, Scorpio, Rexland, Legends) that REX sold by mail order for four decades through his business Drawings by REX. The cover carries his winged-figure drawing beneath a red title band the spine reads rexbooks.press.

REX began drawing in mid-1960s New York, when explicit photography was still illegal but drawing was protected speech, and his work ran in Drummer, Straight to Hell, and Honcho his posters for the Mineshaft, the notorious New York sex club, sold in the tens of thousands and appeared in the film Cruising. He influenced Robert Mapplethorpe, published the hardcover Rexwerk (Paris, 1986) and the retrospective Verboten (Bruno Gmünder, 2012), was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame in 2022, and died in Amsterdam, his home since 2010, in March 2024.