Robert Andy Coombs
at ONE Archives at the USC Libraries

Robert Andy Coombs, Blowjob (2018). Archival pigment print on metallic pearl paper, 40 × 53 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

In a 1964 Supreme Court case about whether an Ohio movie theater could show Louis Malle’s The Lovers (1958), a film in which an adulterous Jeanne Moreau shows her breasts, Justice Potter Stewart vaguely defined pornography as “I know it when I see it.”¹ This subjective standard is still regularly applied to art that explores the human body and sexuality, and the value of work as art or pornography is decided contextually. Now, 60 years after that case was decided in favor of censorship, we have a new litmus test in Robert Andy Coombs’ No Content Warning, recently on view at ONE Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries. Coombs’ images are in the tradition of queer photography that explores the body and sexuality, though they feel more explicit than what has come before, challenging the viewer’s subjective idea of what they are seeing and how they should view the body in front of them.

The nine roughly 40 by 50-inch photographs in the exhibition display what some might see as pornographic: Depictions of tumescent phalluses, anal penetration, and oral sex adorn the walls of the windowless gallery. These are sharp, richly colored scenes of Coombs’ sex life. In Rashad (2019), the artist is seen on his bed, his erect penis inserted in the anus of an intimate. In Ménage à trois (2019), Coombs leans against the white tiles of his shower, his body framed between two men. Eyes closed, they passionately kiss his cheek and the head of his penis while he stares gravely at the camera. A third photograph shows Coombs lying naked on his back, straddled by another man, as they perform oral sex on each other (In Chris’s Studio, 2019). These explicit sexual acts are accompanied by photographs that are more suggestive but still deeply erotic. Hidden among the park foliage, a naked man squats on a bench as Coombs sits before him, his head angled near his crotch, in Cruising (2021). The back of Coombs’ black electric wheelchair, and all of its wiring and machinations, is at the center of the bucolic photo.

What separates these photos from those typical of the genre is that Coombs, who is paraplegic, has made himself the main subject. Alongside explicit depictions of sex, the photographs also picture Coombs’ private life and space. In Rashad, Coombs’ bedside table is covered in medical supplies and a lime green multiweek pill organizer. Above the headboard is a store-bought frame filled with snapshots of Coombs’ life before his spinal cord injury. In Ménage à trois, the shower’s accessibility grab bar looms beside the three men. At Coombs’ stomach runs a thin rubber tube for his unseen urostomy pouch. The pouch is the star of the only photo from which Coombs is absent, Piss Yellow Hair (2019): An unnaturally blond young man in a leather harness, framed close-up from behind, holds the bag above his head and pours Coombs’ urine on himself from its spout—the Coombs way to piss play.

The photographs, curated by Alexis Bard Johnson, Cyle Metzger, and Quetzal Arévalo for the exhibition, are from the series CripFag (2017–present)—Coombs’ main project since I met him in 2018 at Yale, where he and my partner were classmates. His photos were always a shock at crits, not simply because of the explicit subject matter, but because he was using color so vibrantly and—assured of his work—printing his images at a large scale. There was nothing diffident in his presentation, then or now.

So much of popular queer male photography has been about demurely showing an ideal male body—for instance, the 1940s black-and-white nudes of George Platt Lynes or the midcentury beefcake photography of Bob Mizer—and Coombs’ photographs are a refreshing evolution of these classic approaches to gay photography. In 1951, Mizer started Physique Pictorial, a magazine that featured homoerotic photographs of bodybuilders and fetish drawings by artists like Tom of Finland.²,” accessed September 26, 2024, https://store.bobmizerfoundation.org/collections/physique-pictorial-vintage.] Physique Pictorial was deeply influential on queer art, inspiring photographers like Robert Mapplethorpe.³ While Lynes and Mizer photographed naked men with cheery smiles and flaccid penises, Mapplethorpe, influenced by the fetish scene he encountered in New York clubs, made more explicit work about piss, leather, and even fisting in his 13-image series X Portfolio (1977–8). X Portfolio was a challenge to, and an evolution of, the limits of what a photographer could show. Mapplethorpe pushed queer photography to a new standard, the once obscene now classified as art.

Coombs, whose disability prevents him from having the perfect beefcake body, places himself in his photographs and intimately shows his body, challenging viewers to view him and other disabled people as sexual beings. In six of the nine photographs in No Content Warning, Coombs looks directly into the camera as if staring back at the viewer. In Blowjob (2018), Coombs is tipped back in his wheelchair and his eyes are all we see of his face, which is otherwise blocked by the bare ass of a model-esque man. The man he’s presumably performing oral sex on is immaterial because the most intimate moment is happening between Coombs and the viewer. Here, and elsewhere, Coombs’ eyes say, “I see you, I know you see me, don’t look away.”

This review was originally published in Carla issue 38.

Philip Anderson writes fiction and criticism. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband, an artist, and their two cats, Sherwood and Blue Ivan.

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