Selling Gender and Sexuality

Lewis Ginter is known in Richmond as a generous philanthropist. He is the man behind the  Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens  and the  Jefferson Hotel . The latter was estimated to cost between $7 million to $12 million when it was built in 1895.

Ginter's causes were numerous, including Richmond orphanages, hospitals, colleges, libraries and churches. Ginter once said, “what I have to give will be to Richmond institutions. I am for Richmond, first and last.”

A lesser-known fact about Ginter is that he made his money in tobacco. His idea to create the “cigarette card”—featuring baseball players, war generals, and female “beauties”—transformed American advertising and served as the model for the popular baseball card. While James B. Duke is lauded by history textbooks as the pioneer of modern cigarette manufacturing and marketing, Ginter has received little acknowledgement for the way he introduced the Virginia bright leaf cigarette to the world, creating an advertising model that favored the faces and bodies of attractive, strong men and beautiful women. 

Ginter's cards were all about beauty, strength, and physique. Cigarettes were a novelty in the late 1800s: less than two percent of Americans smoked them. Those who took up the habit had the choice of gazing down upon anything from a shirtless boxer, a "beauty," a famous baseball player to a conqueror, or a Native American “chief,” while taking a smoke.

Ginter was committed to introducing his "Richmond Gems" cigarettes to Europe. In all, he traveled across the Atlantic over thirty times.

With his cigarettes, Ginter brought all-American beauties and bodies adorning the packaging abroad. The men of elite London clubs felt that they could escape their mundane lives by smoking the foreign novelty. By 1888, Allen & Ginter were making two million cigarettes a day in Richmond.

While Ginter sold packages covered with female “beauties,” Ginter’s baseball cards withstood the test of time. Baseball players, from the turn of the nineteenth century until today, are the embodiment of all-American male strength and power. Allen & Ginter’s use of baseball players, boxers, and war heroes on its packaging inspired companies across various industries to use images that conveyed hypermasculinity to sell products.

The image’s on Ginter’s cards are up to interpretation: while they could be viewed as celebrating expectations of masculinity, their emphasis on male physiques could also be read as homoerotic. In fact, Ginter had a long-term romantic relationship with a man, John Pope. Pope was one of Ginter’s most trusted business partners and became the Vice President of Allen & Ginter in 1888. The two men lived at 901 W. Franklin St., where their individual rooms were connected by a private hallway.

While it may seem ironic that a gay man would promote images of traditional “manliness” in order to sell his products, society’s silent acceptance of Ginter and Pope’s relationship granted them space to be together, albeit not publicly. Just years after Ginter’s and Pope’s deaths, homosexuality became taboo in American society, and it would stay that way for decades. Yet, even as "closet" formed around gay men and women, the tobacco industry's future imagery—from sailors to the Marlboro man cowboy—could be doubly read as secret gay icons.