Domingo Francisco Juan Esteban “Dom” Orejudos, Secundo (July 1, 1933 – September 24, 1991)—widely known under the pen names Etienne and Stephen—was an openly gay artist, ballet dancer, and choreographer whose leather-themed homoerotic art from the 1950s onward helped redefine gay male visual culture. Alongside George Quaintance and Touko Laaksonen (“Tom of Finland”), with whom he became friends, Orejudos promoted images of gay men as strong and masculine against the then-dominant stereotype of weakness and effeminacy. With first lover and business partner Chuck Renslow he built landmarks of late-twentieth-century gay male culture: the Gold Coast bar, Man’s Country bathhouse, the International Mr. Leather competition, Chicago’s August White Party, and magazines including Triumph, Rawhide, and Mars. He was also a serious force in Chicago ballet. For leather and BDSM readers, Orejudos is not a side note to Tom of Finland—he is a co-architect of the look, the venues, and the contest culture that still structure the scene.
Early life and the name Etienne
Orejudos was born in Chicago, attended McKinley High School, played violin in the school orchestra, served as concertmaster in the All Chicago High School orchestra, and competed in gymnastics. His first erotic works appeared while he was still in high school, so he chose a pen name with “real flair”: Etienne, the French form of his middle name Esteban. He studied drawing for a semester at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago but found the approach frustrating. At twenty he was approached on Oak Street Beach by Chuck Renslow (then twenty-three) to model for photographs. They began a relationship and founded Kris Studios, a physique photography studio that supplied images to gay magazines they published. The studio name partly honored transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen.
Art career: Etienne, Stephen, Mars, and murals
Commercial drawing began in 1953 with erotic illustrations for Tomorrow’s Man, a magazine published by Irv Johnson, owner of the gym where Orejudos trained. He used Etienne for much of the work; pen-and-ink pieces in a slightly different style were signed Stephen—the English equivalent of Esteban—to imply a multi-artist studio. Those Stephen drawings became storybooks among the first explicit homoerotic comics. In 1958 Orejudos and Renslow bought Johnson’s gym, renamed it Triumph Gymnasium and Health Studio, and moved photography upstairs. In 1963 they launched Mars, an openly leather-focused magazine, and produced non-explicit gay-themed 16 mm shorts written and directed by Orejudos.
In the early 1970s the couple lived in the Francis J. Dewes mansion; Orejudos kept a third-floor art studio. After a plumbing flood destroyed much of his archive in the 1970s, he gave the remainder to Target Studio, which became his primary publisher. In 1978 he shared a San Francisco gallery show with erotic artist Al Shapiro (A. Jay). He designed the International Mr. Leather logo and much of the contest’s advertising and merchandise, and painted murals for the Gold Coast (with help from Chuck Arnett), Man’s Country, Zolar’s, the Mineshaft, and Club Baths Kansas City. Drummer and other gay magazines carried his work widely. Orejudos was a pen pal of Tom of Finland and introduced Tom to Durk Dehner, with whom Tom founded the Tom of Finland company and foundation. Dehner later called Orejudos his “best friend for many years” and wrote in 1999 that Orejudos was “indelibly tied to Tom and me, and thereby the eventual creation of the Tom of Finland Foundation.”
Exhibitions have included Fey-Way Studios, the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern, the Chicago History Museum, the Leather Archives & Museum, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Roger Brown Study Collection. In 1986 he appeared in Naked Eyes, Olaf Odegaard’s showcase of gay men’s visual art for the International Gay and Lesbian Archives.
Ballet: principal dancer and choreographer
Orejudos trained on scholarship at Ellis-DuBoulay School of Ballet, then joined the Illinois Ballet Company as principal dancer for nine years and became resident choreographer. After the company closed in 1972 he choreographed for another decade with Delta Festival Ballet in New Orleans. He created eighteen ballets staged by some twenty regional companies—Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Houston, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Omaha, and more—and received three National Endowment for the Arts grants. His ballet Charioteer inaugurated color broadcasts for Chicago’s WTTW and helped the station earn three Emmy Awards. He also danced in touring companies of West Side Story, The King and I, and Song of Norway. Leather art and classical dance were not sequential careers for him; they ran in parallel for decades.
Personal life and death from AIDS complications
Beyond the long partnership with Renslow, Orejudos met Robert (Bob) Yuhnke at a New York leather party in 1969. They kept a long-distance relationship until Yuhnke moved to Chicago in 1979. In 1980 they settled in Eldorado Springs, Colorado, remaining there until Orejudos’s death, though he still spent time in Chicago until his mother’s death in 1984. During travel with Bob in China in 1987—before joining a Boulder Sister City delegation’s planned visit to Lhasa, Tibet—he contracted pneumonia. That illness revealed an AIDS diagnosis; declining health led to death from AIDS complications on September 24, 1991. He is commemorated with three separate panels in the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
Legacy: Leather Hall of Fame, LA&M, and influence
In 1993 Orejudos received the Forebear Award in the Pantheon of Leather Awards. In 2013 he entered the Leather Hall of Fame. The Leather Archives & Museum holds the largest collection of original Etienne works; Renslow founded LA&M in large part to display and preserve that art. The museum’s auditorium, lined with Orejudos murals, is named for him, and LA&M periodically sells merchandise featuring his images. His style influenced later erotic artists including Bill Schmeling. Durk Dehner in 1999 called him the “quintessential humorist” of homoerotic history—stories where someone is the brunt of the joke, often under severe physical torment, for another ruffian’s sexual pleasure, with “gutter dialogue” that delivered the heat Flash Gordon and Spider-Man never could. Jack Fritscher wrote in 2006 that if there is a “gay Mount Rushmore of four great pioneer pop artists,” the faces would be Chuck Arnett, Etienne, A. Jay, and Tom of Finland.
In 2018 fashion label JW Anderson released a collection inspired by Orejudos. Dazed that year argued his “sexed-up leather boys” still matter because they flipped the assumption that heterosexuality and masculinity always travel together: hyper-muscular arms, exaggerated anatomy, parodies of masculinity with a sexy tongue-in-cheek twist—disruptive enough to mark him as a queer trailblazer. Papers survive at the Newberry Library; VisualAIDS and Lambiek Comiclopedia keep the artist record public. For today’s leather bars, IML weekends, and mural-lined dungeons, Dom Orejudos remains both the illustrator of desire and a co-founder of the institutions that gave that desire a city to live in.
Kris Studios, Triumph Gym, and the publishing stack
Physique photography under censorship required coded masculinity; Orejudos and Renslow built Kris Studios partly under Christine Jorgensen’s name-honoring umbrella and fed magazines that could not yet be fully explicit. Buying Irv Johnson’s gym in 1958 and renaming it Triumph put the photo studio upstairs and the bodies downstairs—a vertical integration of training, looking, and publishing. Mars in 1963 went openly leather when many titles still hid. Non-explicit 16 mm shorts extended the brand into moving image. The later flood that destroyed archives is a queer history tragedy; Target Studio’s role as residual publisher and LA&M’s later salvage mission are why mural-scale Etienne work still teaches new leather generations what the 1970s walls looked like at Gold Coast, Man’s Country, Mineshaft, and Kansas City Club Baths.
Humor, torment, and the Tom of Finland triangle
Dehner’s portrait of Etienne as homoerotic humorist—victims of the joke under sexualized torment, gutter dialogue delivering what superhero comics refused—is key to reading the art: not only heroic muscle, but comic cruelty among ruffians. Introducing Tom of Finland to Durk Dehner wired Orejudos into the foundation story of the Tom of Finland Company itself. Fritscher’s “gay Mount Rushmore” line (Arnett, Etienne, A. Jay, Tom) places him in a four-face canon of pioneer pop erotica. Bill Schmeling and others inherited the linework attitude. Ballet—eighteen works, NEA grants, Emmy-linked Charioteer, principal years at Illinois Ballet—proves the same body that drew leather comics also commanded classical stages. AIDS memorial panels and the 1991 death close the biography; Pantheon Forebear, Leather Hall of Fame, and the Etienne Auditorium keep the name operational. When JW Anderson puts leather boys on fashion racks, the underground Chicago stack (bar, bath, contest, magazine, mural) is still the uncredited infrastructure.
