Lust at last: at age 70, illustrator Bob Ziering shows his gay erotic art for the first time.

Bob Ziering's name might not be recognizable, but his drawings certainly are. For over 40 years he's produced illustrations for such clients as Simon and Schuster, Disney, and the New York City Opera, for which, in one dramatic commission in 1986 for a production of Jules Massenet's Don Quichotte, he created a 40-by-40-foot banner of the great French composer's mug. For two weeks it hung from a Lincoln Center facade until it had to be removed because its weight was causing the marble underneath to chip off.

But despite his mainstream visibility, no one had ever seen Ziering's sexy representations of gay sexuality--that is, until his show at the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation in New York City that ended in June. Aptly titled "Secret Sex," the exhibition unearthed for the first time publicly an Incredible cache of work--mainly pencil or pastel renderings of men engaged in sexual acts--that is "graphic" in every way possible. The obvious standout is the remarkable "bed" series from the '70s: several giant polyptychs depicting a couple having sex in what appears to be the middle of a lazy weekend brunch.

At the time, Ziering, now 70, was already a very successful commercial artist, having just a few years earlier captured the likeness of none other than Hedy Lamarr while working on an advertisement for a beauty product she was hawking. He's still bemused when remembering the prep session he had with Lamarr: "I'm taking pictures"--Ziering tends to draw based on photos--"and she looks at them and tears them up. The floor was just covered with Polaroids because this one she didn't like and that one wasn't good and this one wasn't right."

It wasn't until a fateful session with his then shrink that Ziering finally turned his aesthetic eye inward: "He said to me, 'You know, you've never really expressed your sexuality in your art. How would you do it?' Boy, I jumped into that! This is a very important part of my life--how am I going to express it as an artist who works with representational imagery?"

But the times being what they were, he couldn't think of a single gallery that showed gay art, so "all of it sat in a flat file for years," he says.

That's not the case anymore, and deservedly so, as the decidedly contemporary drawings exert a powerful hold on the viewer, much as they did originally on the artist. "I was very immersed; I was having sex in them," he says--metaphorically, since the work is the composite result of numerous separate studies of different models, whom he typically recruited on the street. "I was turned on by what I was doing, and I think the work is better because of it."

Kennedy is a reporter for New York magazine.