Neel Bate

Neel Bate (1916–1989), also known as Blade, was an American underground artist known for his gay erotic art. He is best known for his 1948 series of drawings The Barn. He began drawing erotica in the 1930s and continued for most of his life. and Tom of Finland.

The Barn One of the drawings from Bate's The Barn series (1948), depicting an encounter between a farmboy (left) and a motorcyclist (right). The Barn was a series of ink drawings with captions telling the story of a sexual encounter between a motorcyclist and a farmboy when the former takes shelter from the rain in a barn. A small number of prints were made by Bate's friend George Platt Lynes, and given to a gay bartender to be sold clandestinely. The prints were seized in a police raid, but in the following years, copies came to be widely circulated underground, even internationally.