John Willie
Singapore-born fetish artist, photographer and publisher (1902–1962), founder of the magazine Bizarre and creator of Sweet Gwendoline, and one of few Western artists whose work appeared in Kitan Club.
John Willie was the pseudonym of John Alexander Scott Coutts, a fetish artist, photographer and magazine publisher. He was born on December 9, 1902, in Singapore, then part of the British Straits Settlements, and his family moved to Britain the next year. English Wikipedia, which draws mainly on Richard Pérez Seves’s 2024 biography, says he was educated in Scotland and at Sandhurst and resigned his army commission in 1925.
Sydney and Montreal
In 1926 Coutts emigrated to Sydney. There, in the mid-1930s, he met his second wife, Holly Anna Faram, who became his muse, and found a circle of fetish enthusiasts around a local shoe shop and a high-heel club. The British magazine London Life inspired him to plan a magazine of his own, a project the Second World War delayed.
After the war he moved to North America. Immigration problems kept him in Montreal, where in December 1945 he published the first issue of Bizarre and introduced both the name John Willie and his comic heroine Sweet Gwendoline.
Bizarre and New York
Bizarre appeared irregularly from 1945 to 1956. Its pages mixed photographs, often of Faram, with costume drawings and reader letters on fetish fashion and fantasy, including bondage. Coutts avoided nudity and other content likely to draw censors. Settled in New York, he saw Sweet Gwendoline published in Robert Harrison’s magazine Wink from 1947 to 1950, met Irving Klaw, and influenced artists such as Gene Bilbrew and Eric Stanton. He published the first twenty issues of Bizarre and sold the title in 1956.
Link to Japan
English Wikipedia, citing Masami Akita’s history of Japanese bondage, says his work appeared in Kitan Club, making him one of the few Western artists printed there. The Lambiek Comiclopedia also names him among the Western artists whose work ran in the Tokyo magazine Uramado.
Last years
Coutts moved to Los Angeles in 1957 and worked as a fetish photographer. After developing a brain tumor in 1961 he closed his mail-order business and destroyed his archive. He died on Guernsey, where he lived with his sister, on August 5, 1962. He was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame in 2009.