Gay Blades: Homoerotic Content in J.C. Leyendecker's Gillette Advertising Images

Abstract

The greatest American advertising illustrator of the early 20th century was indubitably J.C. Leyendecker. He would go on to do more covers of the Saturday Evening Post, continuing into the 1940s, than even Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker emerged from the aesthetically competitive world of magazine illustration that he shared with Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Pyle, John Held, Jr., and a host of women illustrators, first in the interior and then to covers. His early subjects, such as the pious Song of Faith published in The Delineator in 1900 suggest to us the complicated horror vacui of so many turn-of-the-century illustrators in America, seeking the magazine page as a segmented but continuously animated field for image. Leyendecker was already known early in the century as an illustrator of utmost sophistication, his work already on the covers of Success, Collier's, and the Saturday Evening Post. In some instances, this cover art was about isolated heroes, while in others it represented women and men together under the most sophisticated circumstances. His earliest Saturday Evening Post covers were hyperbolically historicist, for example, reconciling a modern woman with ancient Egypt on the May 18, 1905, cover or making sacrificial offering on January 27, 1906. Like many illustrators of the period, Leyendecker used illustration as a means of repre-senting a past, albeit often a past that never was; but in a world that had not yet fully accommodated the photograph to the magazine, the past and present could be melded by equally convincing illustrations. It was, after all, the mission of the illustrator to render plausible a construction, an idealization, and even a composite. These traits would serve Leyendecker well when he moved in just a few years from historical simulation to the condensation of the present. Moreover, in the era of Cindy Sherman, Robert Gober, and Matthew Barney, these distilling and extracting traits seem especially germane. Leyendecker invented heroes. A June 1907 cover of the Saturday Evening Post features a consolidated Joe College of the period, wearing a letter sweater, suggesting athletic prowess, and promising youth and vitality. One realizes how lasting this template was for Leyendecker to see the June 24, 1916, cover of Collier's, also by Leyendecker. Nine years later, the image abides, in part in illustration's concinnity, but in larger part because of Leyendecker's proclivity to the type, an innately idealizing, distilling trait as a designer. Specific embodiments might vary a bit, but Leyendecker was seeking a type, after which the model would only be further refined. As an illustrator, Leyendecker incorporated enough personality to imply a given individual or his possibility, but was clearly drawing a dreamed-of best, a distillation that extracted essential traits of the group into a representative image. Arguably, this distilling capacity, so ably achieved by Leyendecker, is even an advantage of illustration over photography. Leyendecker's singular hero is more identified with his contemporary work for the Collar and Shirt Company of Troy, New York, for whom Leyendecker created the signal image of the Collar Man. Thousands pined after this illustrational image in his embodiment not only of the wearer of the shirt or collar, but of a young, vigorous America. The Company reported that it received many proposals of marriage to this fictive image. The Arrow Collar is -- and always has been -- the boy next door and the perfect suitor. In the campaigns, he is frequently seen alone or found placed in a setting with other men or with a sweetheart. Despite the fact that Leyendecker was configuring his emotions into this ideal man, there is little that associates the Collar man with homosexuality or homoerotics. Leyendecker was gay, but I would not argue that the Collar Man was gay, even if potentially a gay-receiver, one to whom homosexual men might have also wanted to proffer their affections. …