During a vagina-themed dinnertime conversation, Shannon O’Malley asked her friend Keith Wilson, a gay man, to draw a picture of a vagina. The accuracy left a bit to be desired but the conversation snowballed into an art project turned coffee table book called Gay Men Draw Vaginas.
As Vocativ explains:
It became a running joke among their pals—getting the gay guys they knew to draw genitalia they don’t come into contact with very often. The results were usually hilarious, sometimes great and occasionally grim. It became so popular within their circle that O’Malley and Wilson decided to issue an open call to the public, setting up drawing stations in some of San Francisco’s gayest spots.
In addition, over the last three years, O’Malley and Wilson have been soliciting submissions through Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, receiving over 500 vagina drawings from gay men.
The spectrum of drawings is wide—from the offensive to the hilarious. As O’Malley points out in the interview, the best drawings are those that take a more conceptual point of view—revealing an insight into the perceived power and mystique of the vagina by a group of men who rarely come in contact with one.
The guys who’ve tried to draw real vaggies have usually failed; those drawings are basically all the same and boring. But the artists who try to communicate ideas, even if they don’t have any illustration talent, produce the best vaginas. The Cookie Monster one stands out to me as one of these.
The Gay Men Drawing Vaginas coffee table book is being crowd funded through Kickstarter. The book will feature careful curation of of the hundreds of drawings with helpful sections like diagrams and monsters.
We’ve got a well-stocked monsters section, a buildings, systems and diagrams section, flora and fauna, animals, talking vaginas and others. Keith has put the vaginas in a mysterious artistic order so the viewer has a certain, paced experience of the entire collection, like a song. A long, vaginal song.
Image via Gay Men Drawing Vaginas