Photos from the world’s horniest art fair

On Sunday, October 11, in Ridgewood, Queens, there was a line down the block to get into TV Eye, the punk music venue hosting Please Knock’s fourth annual Erotic Art Fair. Over the course of the day, more than a thousand guests browsed nearly two dozen vendors’ best vintage smut, rare books, magazines, photographs, and posters. In-person spaces for erotic art are more important than ever as Meta and payment processors increasingly censor erotic artists and collectors and remove them from platforms, often without clear explanation.

People in leather collars and studded wristbands flipped through Tom of Finland posters. They wound through the room, peering over tables of “Throb” and “Honk” magazines and sorted through stacks of paperbacks with titles like “Lust Lease” and “Men in Lace.” In one corner, a woman played an X-rated video game that involved pressing buttons to simulate sex acts. Up for auction were some rare items, including original manuscripts by Asaji Muroi, the founder of the legendary 1960s Japanese fetish magazine “Kitan Club”.

Please Knock was founded by curator Danna Wexler, who created the Erotic Art Fair in 2023 as a physical space for artists and dealers whose work faces restrictions on online sales and promotion. This past spring, the frustration around increased social media censorship culminated in a lawsuit against Meta, filed by a coalition including Repro Uncensored, a nonprofit that investigates digital suppression; Butt Magazine , which had its account deleted earlier this year, and a number of LGBT+ groups.

Joseph Vasta, who runs Vasta Archives, has been a dealer for 43 years, specialising in vintage, collectable, rare, and unusual erotic material. He describes censorship as a curve that oscillates between highs and lows, that “has gradually become more accepting and then has gradually become less accepting. The internet had a huge impact on that curve and now it's having a big impact on the curve again,” he says. 

“You can watch people being eviscerated, mutilated, sliced and diced but showing unsimulated sex in a movie or art is apparently going to destroy civilisation,” says the filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, who has had several of his films banned both from theatres and from streaming platforms. “But put the cum shot in an expensive frame and suddenly it’s art. I guess you could regard it as a workaround, if not a reacharound.” 

Last December, Instagram shut down Please Knock’s account after Wexler posted about a calendar she was launching as part of this year’s fair, designed by Jurgen Maelfeyt of Art Paper Editions, featuring photography by LaBruce and other heavyweight artists Thomas Ruff, Ami Evelyn Hughes, Eric Kroll, Roger Ballen, Larry Clark, Joshua Gordon, Nobuyoshi Araki, Annie Sprinkle, Boris Mikhailov, Fakir Musafar and AA Bronson, many of whom have been at the crux of free speech and art. 

Overnight, the community she’d spent years building was gone. The account had been shut down before. But this time, Meta didn’t give Wexler the option to appeal the decision. She was eventually able to restore it, but it took months. “Our calendar post showed only close-up crops of hands, shoulders, and faces, with no nudity, and it was still taken down,” Wexler says. “We’re trying to invite people into a world that we can barely show them online.”

It was Wexler’s prior experiences of censorship which inspired her to start the fair in the first place. Please Knock started in 2020 as an online shop selling sex books, ceramics, and custom pins. A few weeks after launching, she received an email from Stripe saying they were shutting down her payment processor: She was allowed to keep the site – she just couldn’t sell anything. 

Over the next year, Wexler tried every payment processor and online shopping platform she could think of but kept getting blocked. “I was like, this is not porn. These are scans of a book,” she said. “I had to accept that I’m considered a porn site, even though no one is masturbating to enamel pins.” Eventually, she found a “high-risk” payment processor that specifically works with porn sites. The problem? They charge exorbitant fees, which large pornography sites can afford to pay, but isn’t sustainable for most small businesses. 

She had a feeling she wasn’t the only one with this problem. Wexler began reaching out to collectors of vintage smut and meeting prospective vendors to learn about their collections. Those relationships became the foundation of the fair. Shortly after, she closed her online shop. “So many artists I know have stopped making erotic art altogether because it doesn’t feel worth it anymore,” Wexler says. “We should mourn not just the art that was censored, but the art that was never created.”

Now, the Erotic Art Fair has become a regular, trusted way to enliven and preserve the archive of smut, an archive that throughout history has been at risk of disappearing. “This is the closest we get to these kinds of archives, because it’s stuff that people hide, if they do buy it, or it gets destroyed because people think it’s worth destroying,” says Paloma Hernando, who was attending the fair for the first time. 

It’s an art fair that can only exist in person, which makes it all the better. Nicolasa Doby has been attending the fair for the last few years, amassing a sizable collection of vintage porn along the way. “It’s an interesting history of sex and pop culture and subversive culture, and it’s cool to see people from the kink scene and the sex positive scene coming and honouring and celebrating their history.” 

“It's not textural, but it's visceral,” adds Vasta. “When people come here, there’s no screens. There’s no guilt. There's no judgment.”