After videotaping the evidence --- Mapplethorpe's X Portfolio, a 1978 series that includes pictures of gay
sadomasochistic scenarios --- police charged the museum and its director, Dennis Barrie, with pandering obscenity.
What has always saved McCarthy's work from being a slight, if gruelling, sort of
sadomasochistic exhibitionism, has been his humour, and the violent acts he perpetrates are often as close to Disney or Warner Brothers cartoons as to S&M
scenarios or the torture room.