The King of My Unrealized Mythical Erotica Dreams
Welcome back to Saturday Night Social.
Spring is here, the sun is out, it is not 70 degrees in New York City right now, but it was on Thursday, and I know, in my bones, that it will be again. As the world (the Northeast) awakens from a dark, dull, and frozen winter, might I interest you in awakening your imagination to some tantalizing, stunning fantasy erotica???
Sometimes you don’t know what’s missing in your life until you arrive at your friend’s apartment to watch their pets for the weekend. “I need to show you what I found at a thrift store in Pittsburgh,” my friend said to me before even saying hi—the mark of a one-in-a-billion find. And one in a billion it was. Mirage, by artist Boris Valleji—90 glorious glossy pages of women in hot, passionate embrace with otherworldly beings.
Having lived as a woman in this world for the last decade, sex with men has become less and less appealing by the second. But just as looking at Renaissance paintings of women cutting off men’s heads feels cathartic, looking at women getting it on with male-like beings who are not human men similarly feels like a spa day for my brain.
This is “Vampire’s Kiss,” which Vallejo captioned on Instagram as “one of my most well-known paintings.” I get why! Cast Jacob Elordi in the film adaptation immediately.
Vallejo was born in Lima, Peru, in 1941 and emigrated to the U.S. in 1964 at age 23. He’s definitely a well-known and celebrated artist and illustrator, and I regret not learning about him earlier. Public education in America fails us yet again. He married another erotic artist and illustrator, Julie Bell, and the two share a website and often collaborate. What a dream.
Mirage also features lovely poems and little nuggets of creative inspiration. “The idea for this book grew out of a combination of love for the human body and frustration with a censorship that divides it into parts; designating some as ‘decent,’ others are ‘indecent,'” he writes in the book’s foreword. Our mythical erotica king. Our creative king. Our anti-censorship king.
He has several artworks on what appears to be his official Instagram, though he hasn’t posted since 2023. Most of the posted works are less “having sex with otherworldly beings” and more “women who like they’re about to either save or destroy the world,” also a huge vibe.
He has plenty of prints available for sale on his website—should you fall down a rabbit hole like myself and choose to become a patron—“Touches” (hot centaur sex), “Kiss My Hand,” (sexy dragon flirting), “Centaur and Mate,” (not my favorite-looking centaur, but a hot centaur nonetheless), and “Hands,” which appears to be a hot mythical gangbang. There are also plenty of women getting it on with mythical female-like creatures.
“The purpose of blending creatures was to create a fanciful integration of possible and impossible,” Vallejo concludes in Mirage‘s forward. “The substance of these paintings (as that of the poetry they inspired) should touch us at many levels, and, like consciousness itself, disclose a continuing variety of possibilities and discoveries.”
If only the real world’s “variety of possibilities” included being tossed around by a colossal, muscular, non-human man.