Dom Orejudos

Dom Orejudos was born in Chicago, where he attended McKinley High School,[4] playing violin in the school orchestra and competing on the gymnastics team. He attended Ellis-DuBoulay School of Ballet on a scholarship, then joined the Illinois Ballet Company,[1] where he was resident choreographer and principle dancer for nine years.[4] He received three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.[4] He went on to choreograph for 20 ballet companies, and staged his own ballet to inaugurate color broadcasts by Chicago station WTTW, for which it won three Emmy Awards.[1] He danced in the touring companies for West Side Story, The King and I, and Song of Norway.[4]

Orejudos attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a semester, but was frustrated by the approach taught there. When he was 20 years old, he was approached on Chicago's Oak Street Beach by Chuck Renslow (then 23), inviting him to model for photographs.[5] They began a relationship. They also founded Kris Studios, a male physique photography studio that took photos for gay magazines they published. The studio was named in part to honor transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen.[6][7][8][9] Orejudos began drawing commercially in 1953, when he was commissioned to draw erotic illustrations for Tomorrow's Man, a magazine published by Irv Johnson, the owner of the gym where he worked out.[5] He adopted the pen name Etienne, the French equivalent of his middle name Stephen.[10] He signed pen-and-ink drawings done in a slightly different style with his middle name Stephen, to imply that the studio employed multiple artists.[11] The latter kind of drawings became the basis for storybooks, among the first explicit homoerotic comics published.[11]

In 1958, Orejudos and Renslow bought the gym from Johnson, which they renamed Triumph Gymnasium and Health Studio, moving the photography studio to an upper floor. In 1963 they expanded their publishing enterprise to launch Mars, an overtly leather-focused magazine. They also produced non-explicit gay-themed 16mm movie shorts, written and directed by Orejudos. After losing much of his archive in a plumbing flood in the 1970s, he gave the remainder of it to Target Studio, which became his primary publisher. In 1978, he had a joint gallery exhibition in San Francisco with erotic artist Al Shapiro (A. Jay).

Orejudos' art was exhibited at the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University,[12] the Chicago History Museum, and the School of the Art Institute's Roger Brown Study Collection Center.[4]

In addition to his relationship with Chuck Renslow, in 1969 Orejudos began a relationship with Robert Yuhnke, which continued until Orejudos' death.[1] They established a residence in Boulder, Colorado in 1981, though Orejudos continued to spend time in Chicago.[1][4]

Orejudos contracted pneumonia during a visit to Tibet in 1987.[11] This illness contributed to his declining health, leading to his death from AIDS complications on September 24, 1991.[4]

In 2013 Orejudos was inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame.[13]

The Leather Archives and Museum has the largest collection of original works by Orejudos under the name “Etienne”.[14][15] It has the Etienne auditorium, which has numerous murals done by Orejudos.[16][17]

He is among those commemorated in the AIDS Memorial Quilt.[18]

• Lambiek Comiclopedia.
• Etienne, Dom Orejudos Papers at the Newberry Library