Art & Artists Online Gallery: The Hun

1st September 2021, 5:26 pm

 

As part of our commitment to protect, preserve and promote the erotic arts for three and a half decades, Tom of Finland Foundation is making online galleries of our erotic art collection available to the public. Patrons of The World of TOM Patreon will receive the first look.

The artist The Hun (Bill Schmeling, 1938 – 2019) began producing work in the 1960s, doing work for Physique Pictorial and other beefcake magazines, initially under the name Torro. The Hun produced series of comics – Hun Comics and Gohr – featuring fantasy sexual adventures of gay men. Stories by The Hun were regular features in Meatmen, and in 1998, Tom of Finland Company published The Hun Book, a collection of his work. The Hun’s work has also appeared in a variety of publications, including Drummer, Straight to Hell and Handjobs.

Bill “The Hun” Schmeling

The Hun cited other homoerotic fetish artists as his inspiration and teachers, including Tom of Finland, Etienne, A. Jay, Domino, Rex and Bill Ward. “Beyond those influences, which are considerable, I am ‘completely self-taught,’ he once said. “As artists never tire of saying. I have been drawing hunky dudes in varying stages of undress, duress and excess since I was five years old. We are talking long-term fixation here!”

He has captured like few others the essence of hardcore BDSM sex between brawny single-minded men. Another obsession of The Hun’s is intergenerational sex, and his drawings of hairless youths being inaugurated into gay sex by big hairy brutes are classics in this hugely popular subgenre. In 1995, President of Tom of Finland Foundation Durk Dehner wrote about The Hun: “The truly fortunate aspect of this work is that the Hun allows us to be pigs, to be as cruel as all hell, to endure excruciating pleasure, and to dish out or take the slimy, grunting, brutal, hairy, messy, expansive limits of taboo kink. And all this happens without committing unsafe acts or cruelty to animals – oh, I mean, men. He is the ultimate safe sex provider. Thank you, Hun!”

In 2002, The Hun was inducted into the Tom of Finland Foundation’s Erotic Artist Hall of Fame.

VIEW THE GALLERY


Bill “The Hun” Schmeling | 30th April 1938 – 12th September 2019

  The Hun was an anchor at Tom of Finland Art Fairs over the years. In 2002, he was inducted into the Tom of Finland Foundation’s Erotic Artist Hall of Fame, only the third person to be so designated at the time, the first being Foundation founder and namesake Tom of Finland, the other being… View Article

Published: 1st September 2021

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