By Paul Varnell

Contributing writer

It is common enough nowadays to see advertisements in gay publications openly aimed at gays and lesbians. But once in a while you also run across ads in mainstream publications that seem to have a homoerotic tinge based either on an attractive or ambiguous image or ambiguous language.

The thesis of Bruce Joffe’s new book, “A Hint of Homosexuality,” is that such ambiguous “gay window” or “gay vague” advertisements have been around almost since the beginning of the last century. His book contains more than 150 ads from the pre-Stonewall era to provide evidence for that claim.

According to Joffe, gay vague advertising really begins in 1905 or thereabouts with the commercial artist J. C. Leyendecker’s drawing of the “Arrow Collar Man.” The man in the ad was youthful, athletic, with a strong jaw line and cheekbones, and he seemed to appeal to just about everyone. Joffe says that at one point the Arrow Collar Man received more than 17,000 fan letters each week.

What readers didn’t know was that Leyendecker was gay and the model for the drawing was his partner Charles Beach. But knowing Leyendecker’s homosexuality can encourage us to look more closely at his other ads for Gillette razors, Kuppenheimer suits, Interwoven socks and several other products.

Consider Leyendecker’s 1917 illustration for Ivory soap, which shows a locker room scene with a direct view into a shower area where two nude men are showering while other men waiting to shower or drying off seem to be surreptitiously checking one another out. Another Ivory soap ad depicts a nude soldier, his thigh blocking his groin area, holding a bar of soap. Who, Joffe wonders, could these ads be expected to appeal to?

But Leyendecker and his clients were not the only ones appearing to open the gay window. During the Second World War, Cannon towels sponsored several ads showing soldiers using Cannon towels. One shows a large group of barely clad soldiers washing up or relaxing while one naked soldier entertains them with a burlesque routine using a large palm frond.

A 1948 series of three panel ads for Schlitz beer includes one in which a foursome of men and women are drinking beer, but by the third panel the women have disappeared from view and the two men are smiling broadly at each other while one appears to be toasting the other.

Among ads that make Joffe’s case most persuasively, one in 1923 for Standard Plumbing shows a younger man in a bathrobe having his cigarette lighted by an older man in a smoking jacket. It is hard to read the ad as depicting anything other than a comfortable domestic situation. And a not-very-ambiguous 1952 ad for Youngstown Kitchens shows two smiling, almost frolicking men in chefs hats cooking a meal in the modern kitchen of their suburban home,

So far, so good. But the book has several problems. Many of the images are not so persuasively gay or even “gay vague.” In his eagerness to bolster his entirely legitimate case, Joffe overreads many ads. Any ad where two men are looking at each other he tends to read as implicitly gay, especially if one is older and the other younger.

Joffe raises this possibility of misreading in his final chapter: “Perhaps what we’ve seen here is just a curious product of the author’s well-meaning but misbegotten imagination.” But after 200 pages of arguing just the opposite this seems an abandonment of authorial accountability. Ultimately, of course, the reader will decide in the case of each ad.

Then too, Joffe has an unwelcome penchant for sexing up his text by adding whimsical or suggestive but irrelevant comments about the ads and the imagined lives of the figures in them. It is as if he does not have enough confidence that his material can stand on it own merits.

And finally, Joffe badly needed an editor to correct historical and descriptive errors. Examples abound. Joffe says an ad for a watch company shows no watches, but one of the men is clearly holding a pocket watch in his left hand. A man said to have slung his coat over his right shoulder has actually slung it over his left. Joffe says one man’s mouth is at the level of another man’s crotch, but it simply isn’t. Joffe refers to “Greek” gladiatorial contests, seemingly unaware that they were a Roman, not Greek, institution. A scene said to be set in a train station restroom actually takes place in the restroom of a Pullman sleeping car. Contrary to Joffe, phonograph discs were not made of vinyl but shellac in the 1920s. And in Joffe’s reference to religious homophobia in Turkey he seems unaware that Turkey was long viewed as having an easygoing tolerance toward homosexuality. There are other examples, but enough.

While most of these and other mistakes do not seriously undermine Joffe’s general thesis, they do call into question his care in reading a picture and his willingness to take account of historical context rather than anachronistically reading modern perceptions back into earlier material. In short, Joffe’s book is extremely interesting and suggestive, but is on several levels irritatingly flawed.

Bruce H. Joffe, “A Hint of Homosexuality? ‘Gay’ and Lesbian Homoerotic Imagery in American Print Advertising.” Philadelphia: Ex Libris Corporation, 2007. $29.99 hardcover, $19.99 paperback.