Memories Of Discovering John Willie

Prolific author and pornographer Irv O. Neil recently did a project with superstar femdom artist Sardax in which they reimagined John Willie’s Sweet Gwendoline as a dominatrix called Adorable Gwen.

Irv’s post about the project includes these reflections on the fateful day he discovered John Willie:

I can remember what I was doing on the day John Alexander Scott Coutts, aka John Willie, died — August 5, 1962 — but only by default. Marilyn Monroe’s death had hit the Chicago papers on Sunday morning August 5 (she’d died late the night before) and it was a big event, even for a kid like myself who didn’t know much about her other than she was a super-famous and beautiful movie star. I can’t recall now if I’d even seen any of her films yet at that point–maybe I’d seen The Seven Year Itch on tv, but I can’t be sure; but her dying so young, and presumably by suicide, was so shocking I can remember where I was when I heard it: standing in the bathroom, listening to the news on a transistor radio. I called out to my mother, who was in the kitchen, “Ma, Marilyn Monroe died!” Why would someone so famous and beautiful kill herself? One of the great mysteries of life was thus first introduced into my consciousness.

John Willie died at 59 in England on that same Sunday, but I wasn’t to discover him for approximately another eleven years. By 1974, I was living in Manhattan, and discovering my taste for Times Square and the great informal museum of porn that was 42nd Street. One night I walked into one of the seediest shops in the area — it was located on Seventh Avenue around the corner from 42nd Street — and it was basically a small but cavernous store with tables of magazines and nothing on the beige walls. After looking through some typical photo magazines, I came upon a cardboard box of items on one table that looked different from the usual ’70s smut pix of grungy chicks and hairy studs, and took into my hands elegant digest-sized periodicals wrapped in plastic with artist-rendered covers. One cover had a pretty girl in heels and chains with a devil leering behind her. Another cover was a painting of high heel shod feet with the ankles bound together with decorative ribbon. The title on both magazines was Bizarre, and I didn’t have to look inside to know that these items were worth purchasing sight unseen (the cranky looking clerk probably wouldn’t have let me open them anyway). They were $3 each then, or $18 in 2022 money; so although they sound cheap now, they weren’t: to put it into perspective, I could get two eggs, toast, potatoes and coffee for breakfast at a diner in 1974 for 79 cents, and my weekly rent for a room in a residential hotel was $23 a week, or $92 a month. In any case, I didn’t have much dough to spend from the temporary office work I did at the time, but I had to have these magazines. In the budding stages of my collecting habit, I bought them. I’d been introduced earlier to the work of Gene Bilbrew through reprints of his femdom imagery in Nugget magazine in 1973, but the creator of these Bizarre magazines was new to me, and it was the beginning of an admiration that continues to this day. I still have those issues, too. And it’s odd to me also that I can so distinctly remember the way the store looked, wherein I purchased them. I guess in a way it was a kind of momentous event!

My one and only visit to the porn shops of Times Square was far too late. The 1990s were well-advanced, Rudy Giuliani had arrived, and the pornographic glory was long gone, even if I did manage to buy a couple of badly duplicated but extremely raunchy bondage videos on VHS. Nonetheless, Irv’s account reminds me so very strongly of the kid-in-a-candy-shop sensation the first time I walked into The Magazine in San Francisco and bought my very first bondage magazine (an issue of Bondage Life).

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