Downloaded from YTS.MX
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
♪
- People talk about queerness
as if it's something new, right?
But we've always been here.
And because of society seeing our community as other,
it's been a very complex search, I guess,
looking for myself within media.
You know, I've always seen bits and pieces of myself,
but I don't think I've ever seen myself complete or whole.
But then...
Oh, my God!
I can't, I can't, bb.
Black trans power.
Black trans power, bb.
It's huge!
Queer folks are often looked over
and not even given a chance.
So seeing these beautiful representations of queerness
that portray what you're either feeling
or what you want to experience
give some kind of hope that you can just be yourself.
[ Laughs ]
But going back into our history,
queerness was so criminalized,
we had to keep a low profile
and use coded language to express ourselves safely.
And we've seen it within art and advertising,
like in the imagery of this gay artist, JC Leyendecker,
who was working in the early 1900s.
He was able to thread in queerness
in an era when it's not accepted.
But he was kinda erased from history.
♪
[ Page turning, pencil scratching ]
- December 3rd, 1950.
I've spent the day thumbing through old paintings
in the studio,
many of them from decades ago.
The canvases take me back to a time less encumbered
by what might have been,
the beginning of it all.
I still remember leaving Chicago,
boarding an ocean liner headed for Europe.
[ Bell clanging ] I was 19 years old.
I'd saved every penny to achieve my dream,
to study art in Paris.
♪
- Paris was the art center of the world,
and Leyendecker studied at the Académie Julian, which was
more encouraging of the free spirit to come out.
And he actually got to study and become friendly with
the famous French poster artists --
Chéret...
Toulouse-Lautrec...
and Mucha, who became JC's mentor.
This was Art Nouveau, which was less formal,
and all this advertising art
was plastered all over the Paris streets.
And JC was entranced.
He realized that you could do something
that you felt good about as an artist,
but you were also delivering a message to an audience.
So he went to the center of publishing,
which was New York.
♪
- When he arrives in New York,
this is right after the Oscar Wilde trial,
when Wilde is locked up for being gay.
So Leyendecker is coming at a moment
when there's such concern about degeneracy in the arts.
And wanting to be a commercial artist,
Leyendecker had to keep
his sexuality under wraps, of course.
- And in 1899,
Leyendecker did his first cover for "The Saturday Evening Post,"
and at the time, "The Saturday Evening Post"
was the most popular weekly magazine across America.
And its cover told the whole story in one image.
So for Leyendecker, this was a moment of arrival.
Leyendecker was a master
at painting the male figure.
He found candlelight was exaggerating the light
and the shadow,
so if he would put a little oil on the muscles of his models,
he could then capture an exquisite male form.
♪
He would always have the most gorgeous men model for him.
And some of them became famous actors,
such as John Barrymore...
- I fell in love last night.
- ...Brian Donlevy...
- I know. Its tough.
- ..and Fredric March...
- Man is not truly one,
but truly two.
- But then...
- It was late 1903 when a particularly striking young man
appeared at my door.
He said his name was Charles A. Beach
and that he wanted to be a model.
- Leyendecker was enthralled
with Beach's tall, beautiful body
and his perfect nose, perfect eyes, perfect mouth.
He loved painting Charles Beach.
- I was hired by Arrow shirts
to design an advertisement for their new collars
that would feature a man in Arrow clothes.
I pitched their advertising director
to make it something more --
not simply a man, but the perfect man,
brought to life in an advertisement.
- He gave him different hair coloring many times,
but the Arrow collar man was always Charles Beach.
And Arrow shirts sold like crazy,
putting almost every other shirt maker out of business.
Before that point, the male fashion plate
was incredibly rigid,
just like cut-out dolls, essentially.
But Leyendecker's clothed figures are always nude,
in a way,
because there's always a body underneath that suit.
And that is something that we may take for granted today.
You know, you sell through the body.
♪
But Leyendecker was one of the first,
if not the first, to do that.
- The Arrow collar man became the first male sex symbol.
I mean, even my age, I still find a well-dressed man sexy.
- There was something about the way Leyendecker captured men
that straight women would find appealing
and a straight man would look at and say,
"I want to look like him," or, "I want to be like him."
But a gay man would say, "Mmm! [Laughs]
There's someone I think I might want to put on the wall."
- It was an innovation.
And as Charles Beach posed more and more for Leyendecker,
they fell in love.
- When I first came out, I always had a hard time
because, you know, I find trans women
to be the most beautiful women, right?
We're powerful and we walk down the street,
and I'm like, "Oh, my God, yes!"
You know, I want to be real loud, but I'm like,
"You know, you have to be subtle, you know?
Maybe the girl doesn't want everybody to know her tea."
So I give little hand gestures and little winks,
just to acknowledge that, you know, I recognize you.
And this kind of coding is what JC Leyendecker does
in a lot of his images.
- He builds a kind of homoerotic intimacy and physical connection
in places where you may not even notice it.
Like, he's very interested in putting male athletes
in various states of undress
in relationship to clothed men.
- Or when he was given a commission --
"We have a new collar coming out for Arrow shirts.
You run with it" --
he comes up with a gorgeous depiction of sexual tension.
- This man who's holding the golf clubs --
he's got an interesting grip on that bag --
the way it's splayed between his legs,
the way it covers the crotch, the direction of it,
and there's another man that's looking
really past the woman in between them
at looking at him.
- This was coded advertising with a double message
that's supposed to, you know, portray one thing,
but it really means another.
And for people who aren't familiar with queer culture,
that would go right over their heads.
- As subtle as he was,
he was still showing us male relationships,
this intimacy between men.
- So Leyendecker -- through his seductive surfaces,
he is able to lend anything a kind of homoeroticism.
♪
- For many years, I owned a particular advertisement
painted by JC Leyendecker for an Ivory soap bar.
It looked absolutely magnificent on the wall,
and I walked by it all the time.
So one day, Whoopi Goldberg, who was a friend of mine,
came over, and she said,
"Judy, did you see that painting?"
And I said, "Yes, I've had it for 10 years."
So I looked at it just like I've always looked at it,
and I said, "I don't see. Is there something the matter?"
And she finally points
to the shadow of an erection.
And now that's the only thing I see.
- It's kind of hard to imagine [laughs] that he didn't --
that he didn't know what he was doing when he did that.
[ Clears throat ]
I was partner and founder of an agency
that specialized in LGBT marketing in the early '90s.
And we learned that the lesbian community
had been a big fan of Subaru for years.
It was kind of like a little secret.
It became a game of figuring out,
how do we signal the consumer that this ad is meant for them
using just language?
And one of the first campaigns that most successfully did that
had vanity plates designed to speak to the consumer.
And at the time, Lucy Lawless was in "Xena: Warrior Princess."
And for some reason, the lesbians adored Xena.
So that was one of the plates.
And so I'm standing at a corner in San Francisco,
and a bus pulls up, and it had one of these ads on the side.
And straight people just looked at it as if it was nothing,
but a gay couple looked at it and they kind of pointed at
the "XENA LVR" plate, and they start laughing.
And I thought, "Job done."
They connected all the dots, and they got,
"That's for me. That's the message for me."
And I now realize that the solutions
that we came up with for Subaru --
they're not that different than what JC Leyendecker did
back in the 1920s.
- In JC Leyendecker's imagery of Charles Beach,
you see a definite strong love for him, you know?
And I think when you are trying to get
authentic emotion within art,
the relationship between artists,
like painter and subject, is so important.
- Leyendecker and Charles Beach
were in a committed relationship.
And Leyendecker recognized that they complemented each other.
JC was more interested in just painting,
while Charles was the business personality.
So eventually, Charles became his manager.
They were making, in today's dollars,
millions of dollars.
And they moved into a beautiful mansion.
♪
They had acres of land
so they could be out in the garden
or inside, modeling and painting.
♪
They had spectacular parties.
It was like "The Great Gatsby."
F. Scott Fitzgerald and other famous friends would come
who were very open and interested in art.
- The '20s was a moment of great progress and visibility
for queer folks.
- And New York at that time was arguably the place to be
if you're gay.
- You have these nightclubs that were melting pots of New York,
where people of different identities,
like gender variant people,
what we consider to be drag queens nowadays,
could have community at and be free.
- And this is Leyendecker and Beach's life.
♪
- In the Roaring Twenties,
American illustrators were like celebrities today.
And Leyendecker was a household name.
And it's because of the iconic American imagery he created,
like his holiday covers for "The Saturday Evening Post."
- Leyendecker provided the imagery for American traditions,
around which those holidays then start to be organized --
fireworks as a part of the 4th of July,
flowers on Mother's Day.
- And he came up with the rotund, jolly Santa Claus
that you see all around today.
So advertisers demanded JC Leyendecker.
He captured that essence of "The Great Gatsby" era
when you were carefree and gay and uninhibited.
♪
- The richest country in the world
began a bitter journey downhill.
The stock market buckled and crashed,
and the nation's economy plummeted into the Depression.
- In the '30s, during the Depression,
it's as if it's a back-to-basics,
back-to-morality kind of moment in the U.S.
And there was this clamping down
on anything deemed excessive or non-normative.
- These laws are put in place to police people,
to police how people dress, to police who they love.
- So JC and Charles hid their relationship from the public
because society wasn't open
and society wasn't accepting.
[ Indistinct talking ]
- At a banquet for the New Rochelle Art Association,
I met a young illustrator named Norman Rockwell.
It seemed he was looking for something of a mentor.
Rockwell took a studio next to mine in the city.
He'd often knock on my door and ask my advice on a painting.
- It was Rockwell's aspiration to become like Leyendecker.
He even wanted to know Leyendecker's secret
of how he painted.
And Rockwell confesses in his book,
"I tried and I failed."
- Rockwell said again and again he wanted to please people,
like the audience of "The Saturday Evening Post" --
those middle-class, straight Americans.
And Leyendecker didn't do any of that.
[ Cheers and applause ]
- While Leyendecker shrunk from the public eye,
Rockwell sought it.
And it drove him to become even more popular than Leyendecker.
- By the end of the Depression,
I'd lost many of most of my notable commissions,
among them Arrow collar and Kuppenheimer clothing.
Then in 1942, I received word from
"The Saturday Evening Post"'s new editor,
informing me that my next cover illustration
was to be my last.
I'd created over 300 covers for the magazine over 40 years.
Charles was beside himself with anger,
ranting "If it weren't for JC Leyendecker,
there would be no 'Post'!"
[ Pencil scratching ]
- I've looked everywhere to try to find the answer
to why he was fired from the "Post."
We don't really know why.
Maybe it is because of his seclusion, his sexuality,
but whatever the case,
this is the moment when Leyendecker falls out of favor.
And in the '50s, another one of these backlash periods happens.
And the repressive, incredibly homophobic atmosphere
of McCarthyism starts to take over American culture.
- And so by the end of Leyendecker's career,
he and Beach became more reclusive.
They kind of fell out of fashion.
- The house at Mount Tom Road began to feel rather lonely.
We were forced to release all of our staff
when the money dried up.
So now it's just Charles and I, left to wander the gardens
and drink alone in the great halls
that once played host to so many wonderful people
not so long ago.
- Leyendecker lived with Charles Beach for 50 years,
and then in 1951, JC was out one day, relaxing.
He had a cocktail in his hand and it fell out,
and he yelled for Charles, and Charles came out,
and he died of a heart attack in Charles' arms.
♪
- Special to "The New York Times,"
August 13th --
"'Model' inherits $30,000.
Joseph C. Leyendecker left half of his $60,400 estate
to a friend who had posed for
the original Arrow collar portraits.
The friend is Charles A. Beach,
who had been associated with Mr. Leyendecker for 49 years
as his secretary and aid."
The way it's covered in the press,
it's coded just like the art is,
through all of these terms that circle around
the reality of their intimacy.
He's an aid. He's a secretary.
I mean, Beach is his lifetime partner,
and there's real pain and trauma there.
- In JC's will, he had expressed
that he wanted Beach to destroy everything --
all of his mementos,
anything relating to their relationship,
and his paintings.
- If you feel that you have to obliterate traces of your life
so that you won't be judged
or your art won't be judged according to your life,
I would imagine he didn't have high hopes
for where queerness could live
within mainstream culture in the U.S.
- The more that we stay firm in our identities
and what we stand for and what we believe,
the more I think people will see us for us.
- And with the power of advertising specifically
to embed ideas in people's minds,
one clear way to do that is to shout it out
visually, powerfully.
♪
But, you know, we tend to think linearly about social progress.
But it does not move in a linear fashion.
It's cyclical.
- As queer people, every move we make is politicized --
me stepping outside every day,
me being able to love who I want to love.
And it just further tells us that we need to keep fighting.
- Because there's always a risk of forgetting history
and entering another one of these backlash periods
against queer people,
just like with Leyendecker.
♪
His sexuality is fundamental
to his removal from the historical record today.
- And although he was the primary image maker of his day,
by the time he died, he was almost forgotten.
♪
But 10 years after his death,
an artist rented Leyendecker's studio.
She allowed kids to play in there,
and they climbed a ladder, they went through a hatch,
and they found a chest full
of undiscovered Leyendecker artifacts,
like sketches and paintings
that were not destroyed.
♪