Some cities saw disturbances caused by men gathering outside department store windows. These shockingly new displays of public sexuality were common in almost all American cities.22 By the 1920s and 1930s, the art of window design and display was spearheaded by homosexual men who, like Leyendecker, drew on a tradition of homosexual aesthetics to promote this wave of consumerism. Vincente Minnelli, who had relationships with women and men and later became a noted Hollywood film director, got his start as a window designer in Chicago. The role of the female consumer also became more and more
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