Roughing Up the Archive: Brian Weil's Sex Series

ABSTRACT: From 1979 to 1981, New York City-based photographer Brian Weil created a project about gay and straight sexual subcultures revolving around BDSM and bestiality. With the so-called Sex series, he hoped to illuminate and celebrate non-normative sexual practices and fantasies. This article proposes that his multipart body of work, with its abrasive look, methodological inconsistencies, and archival sensibility, constitutes a rough archive. Now housed at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Weil's project urges us to uplift the rough, unruly, and unknown dimensions of not only archives of sex, but also our own scholarly inquiries and subjective desires. Permitting our fantasies to take off, the Sex series makes visible the contingent and unstable categories of roughness and tenderness, violation and consent, and falsehood and truth.