Born during World War I, Neel grew up in Seattle, Washington where he had begun to draw even before school age. In grade school he began to draw his young peers into his sexual fantasies. It seemed completely natural to him to picture all the discoveries he and his friends were making about themselves and about each other. During the twenties, he seduced his first boyfriend over the Sunday funny papers during a Summer vacation in Vancouver.

This encounter led to a Summer-long romance and an Autumn full of youthful yearning and love letters after he'd returned home. Upon discovering their correspondence Grace, Blade's mother returned them to him with her best wishes that his gay affair turn out happier than her liaison with his father's cousin.

Throughout high school he drew intently and constantly - using art books as his source material until he discovered how easy it was to cajole his school mates out of their britches to pose for him.

The double disaster of the Great Depression and a family crisis made dropping out of art school a necessity. Jobs were desperately scarce so Neel hitchhiked to California where, amazingly, he found work requiring his drawing talent. Night school classes became a habit continuing into the1980's.

After high school graduation, Neel moved to Los Angeles where there was already a highly developed gay society and began drawing full-time. Because of social repression and fear of the law, the massive body of erotic artwork he produced during the next decades was done anonymously; the unsigned drawings, however, became wildly notorious throughout the world on their own.

During World War II Neel served with the wartime Merchant Marine (an experience which inspired a substantial output of erotic drawings) and, in 1945, moved to New York City.

His series "The Barn" (1947/48) was spread through the country and beyond when the only photocopies of it were confiscated by the New York City Police Department in the arrest of a man. during a raid on his apartment. who had hoped to sell them. Such raids on the homes of gay men were a commonplace of the period.

New York City's "Finest" apparently knew a good thing when they saw it - because soon after the pictures had been carted off to the police depository, photo-sets of the twelve images started doing a brisk, underground business on the streets of New York.

Neel never realized a penny from the voluminous traffic in his erotic visions. He could not exactly complain to the police. The artist did not, however, lose the images entirely. His good friend, George Platt Lynes, had recorded all of Neel's drawings before various disasters befell them and fortunately The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation now owns those perfectly produced negatives.

In 1957 a second depredation was visited on Neel. The bulk of his collection of original works was stolen at gunpoint. That is why the earliest, still extant originals date from no earlier than the mid-50's. During the 40's and 50's the mere possession of gay erotica was a crime and collectors often called each other, jittery in the middle of the night, afraid they were about to be raided. The artist could not even report an armed robbery to the police because of the nature of the loot. That did not, however, stop his out-pouring of work.

The closet most gay men were in at that time was something of a refuge, and Neel, along with his art, withdrew into it somewhat; but only temporarily. The 60's, of course, changed everything and Neel started to sell privately to friends. Countless gay men's first pornographic memories are of hiss artwork - his series "The Barn" is probably the most reproduced series of "dirty pictures" in history.

But, rather than being celebrated, the struggling artist was forced to remain underground until 1973 when he finally surfaced under his nom-de-plume "Blade". The upheaval of the Sixties had finally allowed people to admit they actually had recreational sex lives.

Subsequently he discovered a cache of early pencil drawings on typewriter paper (late 50's/early 60's) many of which were shown in an exhibit in 1980. Apart from being fascinating works of art, they are artifacts of the modern history of gay sexual imagery.

Neel Bate continued to produce work well into the 1980's. He was, however, a heavy smoker and died of emphysema.