“A Passion for Masculinity” (Commentary written and posted online by artist and storyteller Madeira Desouza of Las Vegas, December 2024.)
There’s no denying my passion for masculine men influences my art and storytelling.
Why would I even attempt to deny this? I am proud of this trait, which I fully own and admit openly. Anyone can see evidence of my passion just by looking at my work from 2007 to today.
Men who were within sight influenced me from a very early age. I was 17 months old when my mother's father, my maternal grandfather, was in his mid-forties. I was too young to form any memories of him. I don’t believe anyone can process and retain memories when they are so young.
In my imagination, I envision him strictly in black-and-white. Half his face is obscured in darkness. He’s in vague Western wear as he leans against his mid-century car.
That man made front-page news in the slow little town where I was born. He murdered his wife–my mother's mother–who was only in her forties. He used a shotgun to kill her at their kitchen table.Then he used the weapon to blow his brains out.
The shock and trauma rippled through my family household after this murder/suicide. Everything changed suddenly and dramatically. My mother was 22 and my father was 23. They literally were youngsters without any real sense of how this tragedy would upend their lives. I was their firstborn, and the three of us lived in a small rental about ten miles away from where the lives of my grandparents ended so brutally. The bodies were discovered by their young children–my mother’s brother, age 13, and sister, age 11—who were living in the house where the tragedy took place. My parents became my aunt and uncle's legal guardians. They came to live with us. Suddenly, our household grew to five people overnight.
My grandfather was a very angry person. That’s what I learned about him from others. Of course, I don't know anything about him from personal experience because I was too young to remember anything. But after his death, I discovered many things about him and learned what kind of man he was.
He had “anger issues,” as we would say in the 21st century. Together with that anger he had a reliance upon alcohol—maybe to help ease the pain of the anger. When you add the two together—an angry person and alcohol—out of that mix get trouble. I would say that mix of anger and booze was at the root of all of my grandfather’s failings. Everything ended for him on that night when he killed his wife and himself. But from that night forward, the effects of his anger and his drinking and his violence remained as an emotional scar upon my entire family and especially me.
I grew up trying to figure out what goes on in a man’s mind when he loses control of his temper. How does his mind work when he drinks too much to numb thoughts of anger and violence? Even more troubling was that he shot his wife because he believed she was having sex with another man. He thought she was unfaithful to him in marriage. Nobody knows the truth now. The only thing that’s known is he wanted her all for himself and was willing to kill her because of his desires. He was domineering and aggressive towards her and towards his children (including my mother.) He was physically and emotionally cruel to his wife and all his children.
After his death and especially because of how he died, my maternal grandfather became the primary masculine male role model (not in the positive sense) that I was given during my youth. Nobody should be surprised that I would grow up to become an artist and storyteller who chooses to depict violent and often life-threatening themes. My own sexual identity or sexual orientation was also influenced by this same traumatic event during my youth. I grew up feeling sexually attracted to masculinity in males more than I ever was to females even though I persisted in thinking of myself as a straight man.
In my formative years, I saw men in real life who looked and behaved in what I would call “the masculine way,” using today’s terms. I had no label for what I saw in those days. I can describe what I saw growing up in that small, rural California community, however. It was an everyday thing for some men to wear clothing I perceived as emphasizing physicality, such as tight blue jeans that revealed bulges below the belt, bicep-hugging shirts, and well-worn cowboy boots.
Then the Warner Bros. westerns in glorious black-and-white on television added to and enhanced my growing cultural awareness of masculinity during my youth.I developed a lifelong attraction to television shows and movies that depict cowboys. And yes, it was very easy to fantasize about being a cowboy and experiencing what a cowboy finds during his life.
This naturally expanded my preferences into paying considerable attention also to military men whom I perceived (similarly to cowboys) as having distinctively aggressive and combative behaviors.Their outward appearances and their behaviors captivated my imagination throughout my youth.
As an adult, what I saw with my own eyes while I lived and worked in the DC area found its way into my storytelling and art. I worked with members of the military in and around the Pentagon. My job was as a full-time civilian contractor. I contributed directly to the management of public relations campaign efforts to boost positive domestic perceptions about the United States armed forces during the George W. Bush presidency. Those were years of growing domestic antiwar sentiment stemming from the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Each day I went inside the Pentagon for work, I first had to pass by armed young men who conveyed that they would not tolerate intruders.
My employment within the military establishment in those days of certain historical and cultural upheaval and change had an indelible impact on my sensibilities about masculinity and the importance of masculinity, especially machismo. A rather ordinary public relations job for me led to my having close proximity to so many military men I found visually exciting on a day-in and day-out basis.
That shifted my storytelling and art in significant ways. Although I am a peaceful, nonviolent man in real life and have never taken anyone’s life, over the unfolding of years stemming from my Pentagon work, I became known for art and stories depicting extreme sexualized behaviors of military men caught in the act of being themselves in combat situations.
In the early 2000s, using drawings from the late Dom “Etienne” Orejudos, I created Savage War Savage. I created that illustrated story for a website that no longer exists. The site was written and produced by the late George Lehmann, USMC, a gay man who honored and celebrated male virility within an international military context online.
Then, An American Terrorist in Baghdad became the very first illustrated story with explicit sexual content I created that blended with action and real-world themes stemming from the U.S. military missions in Iraq. This appeared during the first decade of the 2000s on the Katharsis website, which no longer exists.
Another representative example of my blending text together with original images to tell a compelling story is Savage Eyes. This remains one of the most extremely violent erotic cruelty stories I have ever produced. All the storytelling titles mentioned here on this page are available to you free of charge for downloading right now.
To my way of thinking and feeling, for my storytelling to be effective and interesting, I must bring out some depth of emotional conflict or impact if a story of masculinity and its perils is worth telling at all. I draw upon what I “see” inside my mind outside of the waking world in which I live.
Dreams (or nightmares) are often the realm in which most people process their inevitable thoughts and worries about suffering and dying. Thoughts and images of dread, horror, and terror easily surface in everyone’s dreams and nightmares. I regularly find myself on journeys not during my waking time but when I am in the dream world where I get frequent inspiration for my art and storytelling.
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See an exploration at this website into the fluidity of male sexual identity.
