John Willie

In 2009, Willie was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame.

Willie was portrayed by Jared Harris in the movie The Notorious Bettie Page (2006), which featured a fictional meeting between Willie and Page.

Bizarre was published, at irregular intervals, from 1946 to 1959. The magazine included many photographs, often of Willie's wife, and drawings of costume designs, some based on ideas from readers. There were also many letters from readers: he was accused of inventing these but insisted that they were genuine. These letters covered topics such as high heels, bondage, amputee fetishism, sadomasochism, transvestism, corsets and body modification. The magazine was suspended completely from 1947 to 1951. By 1956, Coutts was ready to give up the magazine and that year he sold it to someone described only as R.E.B., who published six more issues before Bizarre finally folded in 1959. There was no mention within the magazine that it had changed hands, but in issue no. 23 Mahlon Blaine was introduced by the editor as the artist who was to replace Willie as the primary illustrator. After publishing the first 23 issues of Bizarre, Coutts moved to Hollywood, California, where in 1961 he developed a brain tumor and was forced to end his mail-order business. He destroyed his archives and returned home to England, where he died in his sleep in August 1962.

Bizarre magazine began in late 1945, while Coutts was living in Canada. He published the magazine under the pseudonym of "John Willie", a name he kept for the duration of his career. Willie was introduced to the American fetish underground by Charles Guyette and later worked with Irving Klaw, the infamous BDSM merchandiser later charged with obscenity, but he is best known for his fetish cartoon character Sweet Gwendoline, which he drew in a style that influenced later artists such as Gene Bilbrew and Eric Stanton. Other characters include U69 (censored to U89 in some editions), the raven-haired dominatrix who ties up Gwendoline and Sir Dystic d'Arcy, the only prominent male character and probably a parody of Willie himself. Sweet Gwendoline was published as a serial in Robert Harrison's mainstream girlie magazine Wink from June 1947 to February 1950 and later in several other magazines over the years.

After moving to Brisbane, Australia, in 1926, Coutts joined a local High Heel Club, where he was probably introduced to the print media of a community of "shoe lovers" and other fetishists. He met his future second wife, Holly Anna Faram, c. 1936 and the couple married in 1942. She became his muse and often modelled for him. Because of his access to the High Heel Club's mailing list, Willie was able to begin producing and selling his own illustrations and photographs. He worked at a variety of jobs as well as pursuing his hobby and eventually established a company to produce exotic footwear called "Achilles". In 1945, Willie moved to North America, while Holly chose to remain in Australia, where she died in 1983 at the age of 70. Willie wished to settle in New York but was forced to remain in Montreal, Canada, for a year or so because of immigration issues.

John Alexander Scott Coutts (9 December 1902 – 5 August 1962), better known by the pseudonym John Willie, was an artist, fetish photographer, editor and the publisher of the first 20 issues of the fetish magazine Bizarre, featuring his characters Sweet Gwendoline and Sir Dystic d'Arcy. Though distributed underground, Bizarre magazine had a far-reaching impact on later fetish-themed publications and experienced a resurgence in popularity, along with fetish model Bettie Page, beginning in the 1970s.

John Coutts was born in 1902 to a British family in Singapore. They returned to the United Kingdom in 1903. He grew up in a middle-class family and attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Commissioned as a Second Lieutenant into the Royal Scots, Coutts was forced to resign in 1925 when he married a night-club hostess, Eveline Fisher, without the permission of his commanding officer. He migrated with his wife to Australia, where their marriage ended in divorce in 1930.