![]() ![]() Renslow and Orejudos were already running Kris Studios, a popular beefcake photography spot, and a gym that kept them amply supplied with sculpted models. Shortly afterward, he met Renslow and his partner Dom Orejudos, perhaps better known under his art monicker “Etienne” as a pioneer of the buxom gay imagery commonly attributed to Tom of Finland. I basically said, ‘Oh gee, tell me where they are, so I won’t make the mistake of walking into one!'” Then he planned a New York getaway to find them. By this point, Raven was regularly cruising Bughouse Square looking to be picked up by men on motorcycles because he liked tough guys and tough things. Had he heard of these? Men walked around completely decked in leather. Over drinks one night, someone mentioned there were bars in New York with “strange” people. In 1957, his mom beckoned him back to the midwest to finish art school at Indiana University, and upon graduation, he settled into a Chicago life in advertising. But he was strongly connected to his mother, brother, and extended family. ![]() He started college, then dropped out and fled to New York. By 15, he had given himself a stick-and-poke of a winged wheel, and at 16, he forged his draft card to get into bathhouses. There’s not much known about his teens and 20s except that he was wild and wanting. Perhaps this is some of what drove Raven away from home. Is someone unworthy of love if they’re a coward? Should you just get rid of them? This would haunt him until the end of his days. When Raven ran from his first schoolyard fight, his father was quick to label him a coward, too. Once, he killed their family dog, Shep, for “showing fear.” That meant Shep was a coward, his father explained, and a coward can’t protect his family. His mother was warm and would invite neighborhood kids over even before Raven was old enough to play, while his father was severe and distant in a way typical of men of that generation. “Gorgeous,” he’d later write in his diary. Some of his favorite childhood memories were leaving Lincoln Park Zoo to walk around with his mother, always a balloon in hand, savoring the features of gilded lamp posts and Victorian two-flats. By his own account, he was just a very busy tattooer.īefore becoming Cliff Raven, who the Star Tribune once called the “Elvis of Tattooing,” he was Cliff Ingram, a Catholic kid born in 1932 by a steel mill in East Chicago. He shuttled the community’s ideas and influence into a career that elevated the craft and safety of tattooing but soft-spoken and modest, a man of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” generation, Raven minimized this. If Chuck Renslow was the heart of Chicago’s leather community, Raven was the valve. It’s between him and one of the most influential tattooers in American history whose success is owed, in large part, to involvement with gay Chicago. The conversation is part of an oral history collected for the Leather Archives & Museum by acclaimed leather writer and educator Jack Rinella. Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlife.More than a history of the art or a roster of famous - and infamous - tattoo customers and artists, ✻ad Boys and Tough Tattoos« is a raunchy, provocative look at a forgotten subculture. However much tattoo culture has changed, the advice and information is still sound: how to select a good tattoo artist what to expect during a tattooing session how to ensure the artist uses sterile needles and other safety precautions how to care for a new tattoo why people get tattoos - 25 sexual motivations for body art. ![]() From studly 19-year-olds who traded blow jobs for tattoos to hard-bitten dykes who scared the sailors out of the shop, the clientele was seedy at best: sailors, con men, drunks, hustlers, and Hell's Angels.These days, when tattoo art is sported by millionaires and the middle class as well as by gang members and punk rockers, the sheer squalor of ✻ad Boys and Tough Tattoos« is a revelation. His lascivious relish for the young sailors swaggering or staggering in for a new tattoo does not blind him to the sordidness of the world they inhabited. The gritty, film-noir details of Skid Row life are rendered with unflinching honesty and furtive tenderness. ✻ad Boys and Tough Tattoos« is anything but politically correct. During that time he left his mark on a hundred thousand people, from youthful sailors who flaunted their tattoos as a rite of manhood to executives who had to hide their passion for well-ornamented flesh. ✻ad Boys and Tough Tattoos« tells the story of his years working in a squalid arcade on Chicago's tough State Street. Inhalt Explore the dark subculture of 1950s tattoos! In the early 1950s, when tattoos were the indelible mark of a lowlife, an erudite professor of English - a friend of Gertrude Stein, Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, and Thornton Wilder - abandoned his job to become a tattoo artist (and incidentally a researcher for Alfred Kinsey). ![]()
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