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No American illustrator has been so popular, revered, then forgotten, and ignored than Joseph Christian Leyendecker. Between 1896 and his death in 1951, Leyendecker painted more than 400 magazine covers (including 323 covers for The Saturday Evening Post), advertising illustrations, and American advertising’s first juggernaut sex symbolthe Arrow Collar Man. Leyendecker’s work is full of bright colors and expressive solid brush strokes that capture the energy of the Jazz Age. This titan of American illustration also had a secret. J.C Leyendecker was gay. Along with his images of Mother’s Day flowers, Santa Clauses, New Year’s babies, and burgeoning Americana, Leyendecker created a swath of queer art - plastered over the covers and pages of American magazines - hidden in plain sight. It is an astonishing accomplishment that his work did not irk the interest of turn-of-thecentury censors given his portrayals of Adonislike athletes in homoerotic portraits, which were intimate, centered on homosocial spaces, and depicted “invisible women”. 1 These powerful images of queer space, love, and desire would be the first major commercial advertising behemoth in America and the harbinger of queer influence on mainstream culture in the United States that continues to this day.

Leyendecker’s zenith of illustration fell between the boom of the Gilded Age and the crash of the Great Depression. From 1900 to 1929, the United States went through an economic and social transformation. The industrial expansion allowed for the creation of new corporations, which needed new venues for mar keting and 1 Emmanuel Cooper. The Sexual Perspective (London and New York: Routledge.,1994) pgs. 131 -133 advertisement. Magazines became the de facto means of communication, with the likes of Harper’s, Fortune , and The Saturday Evening Post becoming the criers of American commerce and culture. After arriving in New York City in 1900, Leyendecker was hired by Collier’s magazine to produce cover illustrations. Having gained notoriety for his Collier’s covers, he would go on to work for The Saturday Evening Post , men’s clothiers Kuppenheimer & Co., and Cluett Peabody & Company. The latter of which, he would create the iconic “Arrow Collar Man” advertisements. The Saturday Evening Post would be Leyendecker’s most prominent and longest-running client; it would only be with a conservative regime change at the magazine in 1941 that he would cease producing covers. After the cultural sundering of WWII, tastes in American illustration during the 1940s and 1950s became more conservative and restrictive, leading Leyendecker’s expressive, eclectic, and eccentric style to fall out of favor. Leyendecker would soon be forgotten as images of sentimental Americana, created by his protégé Norman Rockwell, took over the American consciousness. He passed away in 1951, having spent the last years of his life as a recluse. His dying wish was for his partner Charles Beach to destroy as much as possible - sketches, original paintings, letters, and journals - out of fear of revealing his homosexuality in a culture that was becoming more oppressively draconian.

Aside from the numerous covers of The Saturday Evening Post , J.C. Leyendecker’s significant influence on American advertising and commercial culture was the creation of the Arrow Collar Man in 1905. Stylish, sophisticated, debonair, and athletic with a strong brow and chin - this visual concept would become the first sex symbol and advertising giant in the United States. The image would become the masculine icon of the Jazz Age, predecessor to the likes of the Marlboro Man and other branding figures in the decades after the 1930s. An interesting factor behind the image was none other than Leyendecker’s life partner and lover, Charles Beach. Described by Rockwell as “tall, powerfully built, and extraordinarily handsome,” 2 Beach came to Leyendecker’s studio in the early 1900s to be a model for some of his earliest illustrations. When Leyendecker approached the heads of Cluett Peabody & Company to create an advertising image for their shirt collars, he used Beach as the model. Beach rarely left Leyendecker’s side through their almost fifty-year relationship - first as a model for paintings, then as a business and life partner. Charles Beach would die one year after Leyendecker in 1952.

An important thing to keep in mind when viewing “pre-liberation” art (queer art and culture before the Gay Liberation movements in the 1970s) is the concept of coding. As homosexuality became increasingly oppressed at the start of the modern era (the beginning of the Renaissance circa 1400s), queer artists had to hide, or code, homosexual and homoerotic subject matter 3 Their personal experiences and desires had to be hidden within the accepted mainstream imagery. This would manifest itself during the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods (1600s to mid-1800s) in the religious and classical subject matter that queer artists chose to paint. Images of Saint Sebastian with his muscular body tied taut against the trunk of a large tree and pierced by arrows would be a classic image of queer coding. Renaissance artists like Donatello would sexually charge images of male nudes in religious or classical subjects. Many of the same-sex love affairs of Greek and Roman gods would also be a signifier of queer coding, buried within the context of honoring Classical mythologies. A queer artist like Leyendecker would have to code his work as well. With the dawn of mass advertising in the early 20th century, queer artists like Leyendecker camouflaged their homoerotic and homosocial artworks within marketing advertisements. Queer audiences could read the subtext of these illustrations, while heterosexual audiences could be attracted to the sophistication and strength that the images projected. They would see the glances of same-sex desire; straight audiences would see posh suits and displays of style.

Leyendecker’s queer-coded illustrations entail a large body of work over many different types. Figures, Poses, and Glances focuses on three: The Classical Male, The Arrow Collar Man and Homosocial Spaces , and The Invisible Woman . “Classical Male” focuses on Leyendecker’s early work of queering classical-inspired advertising.

The homosocial involves the Arrow Collar Man advertisements, which featured Beach and intimate portrayals of scenes of groups of men. The third category, “The Invisible Woman,” displays an interesting trope in Leyendecker’s group scenes which includes a sole female who is only arbitrarily inserted or is entirely ignored by the male subjects. A final section, Expanding the Narratives , looks to the expanding understanding of queer identity in the early 20 th century and asks if more of Leyendecker’s work can be seen as reflecting on these new considerations.

The Classical Male

The works in this grouping are the most apparent in their queerness. Images of sparsely clad young men, muscles firm and glistening, grace many of Leyendecker’s cover work. From 1897 to 1898, Leyendecker and his brother Frank studied art in Paris. The Leyendecker brothers were surrounded by posters and advertisements, many created by one of their instructors, Alphonse Mucha. Like many artists of the era, Mucha used sensual depictions of the female body to sell everything from soap to coffee to absinthe. The Art Nouveau and Neoclassical styles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries drew heavily on female classical modeling, often coyly revealing naked flesh. While the female form was more subdued in American commercial art, illustrators like Charles Dana Gibson and Howard Chandler Christy still made women the object of desire in their work. Women were both the object and conduit of desire in advertising. Late 19th and early 20th century advertising reflected a consuming male gaze.

Leyendecker was instrumental in morphing the male body and male gaze from an outside consumer to illustrated object. His early work switched female bodies for males, often as scantily clad as their female counterparts. These male bodies kept many of the hallmarks of “Mucha-esque” Classical female illustrations – revealing costuming, pensive glances, and soft, gentile hands. Leyendecker’s early queering of the gaze and coding was illustrated in classical antiquity on the January 1907 cover of Collier’s . He depicts “The Speed God” Mercury, whose muscular, toned, and naked body (except for a strategically placed robe) sitting upon a fuming race car. Mercury’s eyes peak to the viewer over his extended arm, grasping the caduceus staff - a change in perception occurs when the subjects of the picture look out and make eye contact with the audience. The image is no longer a separate scene; the viewer is brought in and made a part of the image. Advertising would employ this trope enumerable times in magazines and newspapers. In the instance of Leyendecker’s Collier’s cover, Mercury’s inviting glance welcomes viewers into the scene. These three images not only showcase the sexualization and homoeroticism of physical bodies and outward gazes but also subvert expectations by substituting male bodies in the place of traditionally female ones. These images allow heterosexual audiences to view them in their casts of antiquity, while homosexual viewers can view them through bodies of sexual desire or aspiration.

The Arrow Collar Man and Homosocial Spaces

Homosocial queer art places desire in a nonsexual context, as opposed to homoerotic art, by illustrating shared intimate spaces and activities among men 4 . These depictions of homosocial spaces are most used in the Arrow Collar advertisements. The exhibition at MUZEO focuses on a selection of homosocial ads that act as a stand-in for the photographs, letters, diaries, and other intimate ephemera from the life of Leyendecker and Beach lost to us. Leyendecker’s first Arrow Collar illustrations were of Charles Beach. Through their years together, Leyendecker repeatedly used Beach as a model (Fig. 2) The Arrow Collar advertisements, displayed together in Figures, Poses, and Glances , show us Charles Beach through the years. Outside of the portraits of Beach as the Arrow Collar Man, the images of male couples displayed to act as windows into Leyendecker and Beach’s shared lives. What on the surface portrays men in casual settings can be viewed as scenes from the domestic life of Leyendecker and Beach.

The Invisible Woman

The images under this topic are the least acute of the different homoerotic/homosocial images and only reveal themselves after careful examination. These images play into the trope of the “beard,” a woman who functioned as the front to her male counterpart’s homosexuality. A woman who acted as a beard allowed homosexual men to hide behind a heteronormative relationship. These “invisible women,” so called because they neither elicit reactions from nor actively engage with the male subjects of the paintings, act as beards for the homosexually-charged composition in the images.

The “Invisible Women” illustrations require viewers to follow the eyelines of each figure to see how they ignore the women in the picture. One of the most famous of these images is an Arrow Collar advertisement, Arrow Advertisement with Collie (Fig. 3) shows two men holding golf clubs with a woman petting a collie dog. While the woman plays with the dog, the two men share a concentrated glance at each other. Hidden within these large scenes is homosexual desire; remove the woman from these images and what remains are stolen glances and deep longing.

Leyendecker’s double-spread illustrations for Kuppenheimer clothes also present classic examples of this peculiar trope. In Depend on Kuppenheimer Value (Fig. 4) , three men in impeccable suits stand around a woman jockey and her horse. While the woman smiles at the man on the far right, he stares at the man in the middle. In response, the man in the middle stares back at him. The man on the far left also stares at the man on the far right – though his expression appears to be disdainful. Is he jealous of the contact between the two other men? This same game of “follow the eyeline” plays out in ads, Kuppenheimer Individuality (Fig. 5) and New Patterns for Young Men (Fig. 6).

The absolute blasé expressions of the men in these advertisements are comical, considering the near nakedness of the women in these illustrations.

The discourse around homosexuality, queerness, and gender fluidity has been predicated on the belief that all queer people were explicitly persecuted throughout history. Only after the Stonewall riots of 1969 did queer people emerge as a cultural and political force. Much of this narrative was created by queer activists seeking to justify and expand political power in the face of oppressive conservative forces in the middle and latter part of the 20th century5. While it would be appropriate to make distinctions between an “out” queer culture, identity, and lived experience forged in the decades after Stonewall, it would be amiss to wipe out the myriad ways that queer people have lived before the riots in New York City. Queer identity (which includes every part of the LGBTQ+ experience) has ebbed and flowed, expanded, and contracted throughout history. In New York City (where Leyendecker lived and worked), queer identity and expression existed broadly and in full public view. In addition to instances of cisgender, same-sex desire, and relationships, there existed categories of “inverts,” people that appropriated gender expressions to their interpretations.

Expanding the Narrative Much of what has been written about Leyendecker’s homosexuality and the coding of his work revolves around discussions of queerness through a binary established during the middle of the 20th century. At the heels of historical events such as World War II and the Holocaust, psychiatrists began categorizing all sexual deviancy into singular, binary categories to reassess societal norms and roles (“invert” and “bisexual” were stylings known before World War II). You were either gay or straight. Homosexual or heterosexual. Normal or Other. In the section, Expanding the Narrative , the exhibition reevaluates Leyendecker’s illustrations and lends to ask if we can see new interpretations.

Before the traditional nomenclature of “gay,” “straight,” “homosexual,” and “heterosexual,” a variety of words were used to describe those on the LGBTQ+ spectrum. For those who did not conform to traditional male gender identity, invert became the popular word. Also used, primarily out of fashion today (or accepted as anti-gay vulgarities), are fairy, pansy, daisy, buttercup, etc., were used6. Understanding how the full expression of gender and queer identity was expressed is essential to understand Leyendecker’s queer work in its fullest form.

With an understanding of the language used during the Jazz Age, we can look again at a myriad set of Leyendecker images, specifically many of the covers for The Saturday Evening Post . Knowing these words and their basis in expressing or identifying queerness through the language of flowers, a new interpretation of many covers presents itself. The word “fairy7” also plays an important role in interpretation. Fairies, or particularly images of fairy wings, may be used by Leyendecker to declare the gender fluidity and queerness of the characters adorning his covers. They were designed as butterfly