Erotic Review #5

Erotic Review was first published as a bimonthly magazine in 1997, and then relaunched in 2024 as an art and literary platform that explores desire in its many forms and complexities.

Expect short fiction, essays, photography, extracts from novels, personal reflections and more.

Editor Lucy Roeber opens this fifth issue—featuring a suggestive black and white gouache illustration by Iris de Mouy on the cover—with a pertinent reflection on the harmful implications of digital censorship on publishing and wider attitudes towards sex. In ‘Collected Desires’, guest art curator Sam Ashby’s introductory essay, archiving erotic art and ephemera is positioned as a radical form of resistance against repressive surveillance and policing; inside, he brings together the postwar archives of three collectors—Vince Aletti, Elizabeth Purchell and Oliver Carter—each of whom have been instrumental advocates for the preservation and educational potential of the visual histories of queer and erotic subcultures. Elsewhere, the Bahraini screenwriter JAA pens an ode to an unexpected on-screen kiss, Taino Mendez explores Steve McQueen’s representation of black masculinity in his 1993 video ‘Bear’, and readers are treated to a previously digital-only extract from the transcript of Four Chambers’ transgressive 2023 film ‘Maman’.