GLR November-December 2023

have moved on and accepted its advances as sincere and thoroughgoing. Eric Gordon, Los Angeles An Inconvenient Truth about Leyendecker To the Editor: Two recent articles—David Masello’s “The Eye of the Beholder” (May-June 2023 issue) and Ignacio Darnaude’s “Leyendecker the Sly” (Sept.-Oct. 2023), discuss the life and career of J. C. Leyendecker (1874–1951), the influential and prolific American illustra tor who was recently the subject of an exhibi tion at the New-York Historical Society. While the articles—and presumably the exhi bition as well (I haven’t had the good fortune of seeing it yet)—appropriately analyze and document Leyendecker’s sexual orientation as a motivator for his presentation of Ameri can masculinity in the decades before World War II, both leave out any mention of the wide range of Leyendecker’s subjects in his art other than those of young men. Darnaude mentions that Leyendecker painted 322 Saturday Evening Post covers. What he didn’t mention, even in passing, was that a substantial portion of those covers were populated with male adolescents or pre adolescents in situations typical of their age groups and of the period in which they were depicted. For example, his Post covers for August 19, 1911, and May 22, 1915, depict

unabashed skinny-dipping—with rosy cheeks at both extremities! A Web image search with the terms “Leyendecker” and “New Year’s” yields an almost annual parade of infants and toddlers from before 1910 to the late 1930s, many of them tastefully un clothed, typical—even expected—in an era whose standards were far different from those of today. His final Post cover, from January 2, 1943, has a helmeted but other wise naked toddler blasting apart a swastika with a bayoneted gun strategically—symbol ically?—placed across his nether bits. This is not to suggest or imply that Leyen decker had any unhealthy interest in children. It suggests that Leyendecker had at least an appreciation, if not a fondness, for boys and boyhood. His images were very much in tune with the times. In short, mothers loved them. The reason this is important (IMHO) is the same as the apparent reason it wasn’t men tioned in the Leyendecker articles: it isn’t po litically correct these days to focus on a gay man’s interest in boys. However innocent— or even helpful—an interest in boys and boy hood might be, somewhere around 1980, gay men agreed to the Faustian proposition that they would disavow any attraction to anyone “underage.” (“Control feminists” developed this notion further to encompass all men and most child-adult [male] interactions except those in an immediate family. Does the term

“stranger danger” ring a bell? As an “equality feminist” myself, I work daily to counteract this noxious trend.) There is nothing wrong with a discussion of how an artist’s sexuality may have guided his art, and how that art may have influ enced society. Anyone with the chutzpah to depict his lover’s face and body, however stunning, as J.C. Leyendecker did in ads, story illustrations, and magazine covers for over forty years deserves to be studied, if not admired. This proposition, however, like any investigation of the past must not be emasculated by revisionist history. It must consider the whole picture. Gerald Jones, Ph.D., Sun City, CA Know Your Middle English To the Editor: In his review of a new book on medieval ism in the Sept.-Oct. 2023 issue, Vernon Rosario claims that in “The Miller’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales , “Absalom sodomizes [Nicholas] with a hot poker.” But this is not what Chaucer actually says in the poem. Ab salom simply smacks Nicholas’ bare butt with the poker: “And Nicholas amydde the ers he smoot” (“And he smacked Nicholas in the middle of the ass”), meaning across the butt, not in it. To “smack” is not the same as to “insert.” George Klawitter, Notre Dame, IN

November–December 2023

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