Ad Schuring

Ad Schuring

Ad Schuring (1950–2024), born Adrianus Schuring, was a Dutch theatre set and lighting designer who forged a reputation as a defender, promoter, preserver, and liberator of homoerotic art.

Art

Defiantly anti-censorship, and a connoisseur of fetish, he devoted himself to giving homoerotic art the respect and status he believed it deserved. "Queer culture without cock and balls? That's called castration," he once wrote.

Schuring both collected and supported gay erotic artists, many of whom became his friends, including Bastille (Frank Webber: 1929-1990), Rex, Willem Kok (aka Dorus), and Martin of Holland.

At his website Delftboys.nl, and blog Darkroom Diaries, Schuring displayed and curated a vast collection of gay erotic art.

Community involvement and recognition

For his commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the medium, in 2016 Schuring received a Dedication Award from the Tom Of Finland Foundation. Schuring was a longtime member of the Delft Homosexuality Working Group DWH, but became dismayed after the Millennium by what he believed was the new prudery and censoriousness of a younger generation, which he increasingly railed against on his other blog Queerlog.

Personal life and death

Schuring considered his religion to be priapism, but invoking 'god' to be intellectually lazy: calling it "merely an attempt to avoid clear and critical thinking and to abrogate personal responsibility for one's own choices."

He deliberately became HIV positive in later life, but died of pancreatic cancer.