Demimonde: The Live Drawing of Suzanne Forbes

Hi! I'm Suzanne, and my biggest, deepest dream has always been to have a book of my art. In twenty years of live drawing people in LGBTQ+ community, I've been able to make a historical record of people in a way a camera could never capture. Now I am too sick to work, and the book is now or never.

The goal of the Demimonde book project is to preserve and share these portraits of kinky and creative queers, trans sex workers, drag performers, dominatrixes and burlesque beauties. I went all in on putting my art online in 2005, and for twenty years my archive of almost 3000 drawings and paintings has been available to download, use and share for free. But online spaces that support sex-positive and gender-affirming art are shrinking fast.

I'm very sick and at the end of my working life. To keep these precious portraits of beautiful humans visible, to protect these moments I shared with San Francisco and Berlin's sexy queers, we need a physical repository too.

If you love queer community, if you love leatherfolk and fetish fashion and sex workers, you want to help preserve and distribute these portraits in the real world too.

I'm asking you to support this project because it's the only way to make a book of my art happen. It's the only way to buy a book of my art. As a former comic book artist, I have never been welcome in galleries (except Madison Young's Femina Potens!) and publishers don't want to work with a sick, fat, old queer lady. I am just barely able to do this now, and if I don't do it now, I never will. The people I have made portraits of are so beautiful. They deserve a chance at lasting visibility, and so does my art mission of two decades.

The money being raised is to pay for the design, layout, proof-reading, print-readiness, print tech, and printing at a very well-regarded short-run printing house in the US Pacific Northwest. It also covers printing of extra copies to donate to libraries and archives. and so much shipping: from the printer to a fulfillment house that will ship US orders and ship copies to Germany, plus a service to ship German and EU orders (I'm too sick to do it myself).

The artwork is all completed, the manuscript written, the artwork scanned at high resolution. Gorham's team will handle the details, making sure the printing is perfect. I have already paid for preproduction work by Berlin creators and design samples by Berlin designer Maria MacDonald to guide them, and chosen fonts.

I am disabled and now no longer able to work, and my husband and I are gonna lose a lot of money on this book, not make money. I believe it's worth it, and so does he.