Treasures of Gay Art from the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation

The first book-length survey of the collection of the Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation, the pioneering New York institution — now the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art — founded by Charles Leslie and Fritz Lohman to preserve gay art that much of the art world once refused to show or sought to destroy.

Edited and introduced by the Austrian curator Peter Weiermair, the volume presents nearly three hundred pages of works from the Foundation's holdings, organized by medium: paintings, drawings and prints, photographs, and sculpture and objects, with images by Paul Cadmus, Patrick Angus, Andy Warhol, and dozens of less familiar figures of gay erotic art. A prefatory note by Leslie and Lohman, a mission statement by art historian James M. Saslow, and Allen Ellenzweig's essay Pictures at an Exhibition frame the plates, and alphabetically arranged artist biographies and bibliographies close the book. This first trade edition followed a special limited edition of 100 copies.

The Foundation grew from a 1968 exhibition of gay erotic art that Leslie and Lohman staged in their SoHo loft chartered in 1990, it was accredited in 2016 as the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the first museum devoted to LGBTQ+ art. Weiermair (1944–2021), longtime director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein, edited numerous surveys of the male nude in art and photography, and this catalog sits squarely within that body of curatorial work.