The Further (Queer) Adventures of Yukon Cornelius

(2019-2022)

Queering Yukon Cornelius was rather easy. I certainly wasn’t the first to see the queer connotations of the 1964 Rankin/Bass Christmas Special “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” Nor would I be the last. Yukon Cornelius was written to be a big boisterous bearded prospector by a (gay) Jewish writer, Romeo Muller, (though I can only find agreed upon suspicion and speculation on that and not confirmed) and the theme in the movie was acceptance of our weird differences. Yukon was on-screen for about 10 min total. The film’s characters (save Rudolph) were in the public domain, so I decided to make Yukon—this large-bodied, bearded prospector—into the gay hero I’d always wanted to see when I was young—the kind that maybe would have alerted me to my own feelings and that they were okay.

I gave him a longer, more detailed adventurous life before and after Rudolph, imagining him meeting other “monsters” called “Hiddens, and helping them adapt to living in the same world with sometimes fearful humans. I was visually inspired by NC Wyeth who painted heroes from classic literature and the illustrators, Walter Baumhofer and JC Leyendecker—whose illustrations modeled what men should look like, what men should do, influencing generations of men. What about fat, hairy, gay adventurers? What about men who didn’t fit into any of the stereotypes for heroes? Could illustration also model something for them? What would queering a hero look like? I decided to see.

I started this project in art school at CCAD in 2019 as my year’s project for an MA. But COVID hit in March of 2020 and I ended up moving everything to the basement of a friend’s house where I would live for nearly two years. I stopped work on the project after the spring semester was over and dropped out of art school. My work later that year got much smaller… and more watercolor… and you can see that in the GARDEN and FAIRIES sections. But this year, 2022, I revived this project for my show, December 15-18 at Dayton Society of Artists in Dayton, OH. To advertise the show and build a series, I painted a small 5 x 7 watercolor painting a day in October—for 31 of them—and then painted about 10 more in November. I wanted to have a larger collection for the show.

And I wrote stories and essays to go with them. The show was wonderful at the Dayton Society of Artists, and the response was so positive. I sold many of the paintings below. In the 31 stories and the 10 essays I got to talk about being gay and comparing that to the life of “Hiddens” and in the essays I talked about what it means when the “Bedroom is your living room”—- about all the ways we “live” in our bedrooms.

You can find all the stories and essays in order on my website at jeromestueart.com. They don’t have a page of their own yet, so you may have to scroll down a bit. One day, I’d love to put these in a book as well, and talk about Romeo Muller, his legacy, his life, and the frequent metaphorical pairing of monsters and the LGBTQ community—- both to hurt us, and in some ways, to heal us. When we embrace the monsters—we find they have something to say to us today.