Tom Hinde – Artist
Hinde’s work belongs to the small circle of San Francisco artists who gave 1970s leather culture its visual language. His lithographs were sold by mail through Denim Publications, which let collectors far from the city own S&M art when galleries rarely showed it. The Fey-Way Gallery, opened on Howard Street in 1978 by Robert Opel, gave him two solo shows alongside work by Tom of Finland and Robert Mapplethorpe. Jack Fritscher knew him as both a subject and a collaborator: the 1977 Drummer feature “Tom Hinde Portfolio: The Artist Speaks,” collected in Gay San Francisco: Eyewitness Drummer, lets the artist describe his own drawings, and in Fritscher’s 1973 Super-8 film The Imitation of Art, Hinde played the martyr. His novel Leather Boy, Leather Man, published as Robert Stewart, shows the same imagination in prose that his drawings show on paper. Training at the San Francisco Art Institute prepared him for it.