Situating J. C. Leyendecker within the Conflicting Narratives of the Gay and Lesbian Past

Abstract

Situating J. C. Leyendecker within the Conflicting Narratives of the Gay and Lesbian Past Michael J. Murphy (bio) Coded: The Hidden Love of J. C. Leyendecker, directed by Ryan White (New York: Imagine Documentaries, 2021), 28 min. One of the challenges of writing about the American illustrator J. C. Leyendecker (1874–1951) is the imbalance between what can be documented about his life and the large body of work he produced over a fifty-year career. Apart from a handful of photographs, interviews, and letters, few primary documents connected to Leyendecker survive and little in the artist's own words. By contrast, Leyendecker left behind hundreds of drawings, oil sketches, and finished paintings intended for mass reproduction as product advertising, book illustrations, posters, and magazine covers and story illustrations. Though Leyendecker's work appeared on the covers of most popular magazines published between 1896 and 1952, his longest association was with the Saturday Evening Post, on whose cover he either created or expanded the popular iconography of US national holidays: pilgrims at Thanksgiving, flowers on Mother's Day, a baby at New Year's, and so forth. He provided advertising imagery for major national soap, cereal, cigarette, and automobile brands but was best known for his illustrations for men's products such as Gillette razors, Williams' shaving cream, Interwoven socks, S. T. Cooper's and B.V.D. underwear, Chesterfield and Fatima cigarettes, and several men's clothiers, including A. B. Kirschbaum; B. Kuppenheimer; Hawes. von Gal; Ederheimer, Stein & Co.; and Hart, Schaffner & Marx. From 1907 to 1932, Leyendecker's paintings of preternaturally handsome young men for Arrow brand shirts and collars helped create the "Arrow Collar Man," an advertising trade character frequently cited in popular songs, musicals, poems, and literature. At the peak of his career in the 1920s, Leyendecker's identifiable style and the ubiquity of his work in popular print media made him something of a household name and one of the most successful (and wealthy) illustrators in America. [End Page 1079] The disjunction between the large quantity of known Leyendecker images and the scarcity of information about their creator is both frustrating and freeing. On the one hand, scholars have little evidence of Leyendecker's goals, motivations, or intentions for his work. On the other, they are freed from considering such issues to focus on what are arguably more interesting and important questions such as the role of his work in advertising at the dawn of consumer capitalism, expansion of audiences for mass print media, creation of national markets for branded consumer products, and reimagining of American national identity in the early twentieth century. However, much of the scholarly and popular writing on Leyendecker attempts to draw connections between the content of his work and the poorly documented aspects of his personal life. Most often, this takes the form of attributing its "homoeroticism" to Leyendecker's likely homosexuality, often characterized as tragic, troubled, or closeted.1 Even when unintentional, in this near obsession with pictorial evidence of his sexuality Leyendecker comes to resemble the stereotype of the shadowy, devious homosexual covertly insinuating an "unnatural" desire where it would not otherwise exist. Ultimately, this approach is a minimizing, minoritizing, and homophobic form of cultural interpretation. Thus, it is somewhat disappointing that the short documentary film Coded: The Hidden Love of J. C. Leyendecker, from the director Ryan White (The Case Against 8 [2014]), focuses on Leyendecker's sexuality and its potential influence on his work, even as it offers the fullest cinematic exploration of the artist and his work to date. Coded compensates for the lack of biographical documentation on Leyendecker through a creative mix of expert interviews, historical film, vintage photographs, innovative animation, and the inclusion of many original Leyendecker paintings and their mass media reproductions. The film will doubtless be welcomed for its contribution to documentary films on LGBTQIA+ people, especially artists and those who lived prior to the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. However, the film struggles when it attempts to map the trajectory of Leyendecker's life and career onto the larger history of homosexuality and its representation in popular visual culture, largely due to its unwillingness to commit to a consistent narrative of the...