Leyendecker, who was openly homosexual, designed the iconic “Arrow Collar Man,” who represented both stalwart masculinity and urban, middle-class upward mobility. Leyendecker’s slightly sleek and prettily dressed office clerk drew on homosexual traditions of the dandy and the fop. The Arrow Collar Man was so enormously popular that even Theodore Roosevelt singled out the image as “a superb example of the common man.” Commentators never mentioned that Leyendecker’s model for the Arrow Collar Man was his lover, Charles Beach, with whom he openly lived and socialized.
