A Love Story: From Vienna to My Ethnography's Book Cover

SUMMARY Anthropologists have often affixed an art cover to their ethnographic books associated with the life of their subjects or an symbolic image apparently related to the main issue under observation. One often wonders: Does that outer message represent the text, the author's response to personal existential experiences, and so on? The art cover of my recent ethnography introducing long‐term research among LGBT organizations in New York exposes a somewhat unusual choice: a seventeenth century Italian church picture. Apparently paradoxical if not controversial: What is a venerated Catholic representation doing in the company of gay people? This article relates the story of discovering the painting, revealing the hidden connection between the text's contents with the drawing's design. Last, the ethnographer's attraction to the characters staged in an archaic scene yet engaging a contemporary accidental viewer.