Blake Jacobsen Brings Blue-Collar Roots to Queer Photography

John Deeriere is a man of many contradictions, at least on the surface.

He is at once wholesome and raunchy. He is both a top OnlyFans performer and an avid churchgoer. He is unabashedly and vocally queer as well as completely and totally embraced by his family and the rural Ohio area in which they live. He is, to some, the goal.

"It's weird to talk about John Deeriere as if it was a third person and not myself, but it's what feels the most natural to me," says Blake Jacobsen, the 29-year-old artist behind the persona. "He was a version of myself that I always wanted to be but didn't think I could be."

For four years, Jacobsen built an aspirational alter ego of sorts under the name, itself a riff on the brand John Deere. Through the lenses of the character's utopian life, Jacobsen launched a wholesome YouTube channel featuring Southern-fried cooking lessons; he distributed a provocative line of merch that turned the spikes on the Harley-Davidson logo into butt plugs and churned out high-waisted camouflage jockstraps; and he managed an OnlyFans account, through which Jacobsen made enough money to pay his bills. All of this was handled through a namesake Instagram page filled with imagery that oscillated between photos of Jacobsen as Deeriere -- reclining in lush green farmland or on a tractor -- and often erotic references to the greats of the gay photography canon, including Bob Mizer, Robert Mapplethorpe, and more. Some of the pinup photography was later repurposed into a calendar.

"They started out as these sort of precarious images that I was making in this really quick way to not be caught," he says over the phone, explaining how he created photos featuring his nude body outside of a studio setting. "But when I started to share these images online and started to notice the attention they garnered, that further motivated me to create them."

(left: image of Blake Jacobsen as John Deeriere)

The images and the persona at large were predicated on imagining a world where Jacobsen could reconcile the disparate parts of his identity. Deeriere provided a world in which gay men from rural communities could see themselves -- not only within the landscapes from which they emerged -- but also within a lineage of queer visual representation that stepped outside of the hackneyed tropes. For some of the work, Deeriere brought the countryside into the studio, creating highly stylized imagery among bales of hay. In the captions of his posts, he wrestled with issues around community, work, the politics of desirability, and more.

"The eroticization of my body is working-class labor," Jacobsen wrote in one. The project itself was the embodiment of that idea.

While Jacobsen never fully became Deeriere, his latest body of work, titled "taking care of roots," narrows the ravine between the two. Created as his thesis for the MFA photography program at the University of California, Los Angeles, the project depicts the shards of his identity: the stark, unforgiving rural landscape that he calls home, the fraught process of negotiating his gender presentation through getting his hair done by his mother, and glimpses of the future as depictions of toxic masculinity are replicated, even in the most innocuous of moments, within the youngest generation of his family. The work still wrestles with many of the same ideas -- rural identity, queerness, and class politics. Now the prism observes them through a different perspective.

"In the 'taking care of roots' project, in some of the self-portraits, there's elements of John Deeriere," Jacobsen says. "There's elements of sexuality in the landscape portraits, but it's a little more muted. Maybe I'm OK with that because maybe sexuality doesn't always have to slap you in the face. With John Deeriere photos, I was really mobilized by a desire to showcase my body, to present my body, to garner attention with my body, to confront the viewer with my body. With these photos, I don't return the gaze."

(left: image of Blake Jacobsen as John Deeriere)

That distinction may come partly because of the differing remits for the projects. While John Deeriere was being broadcast to an audience of mostly gay men online and idealized, "taking care of roots" was, in part, purposed to break down a solid division in his life: to come out to his family. And while that process didn't bring about the perfectly congruent world that Deeriere lives in, it is a step toward what that world might look like for a real-life Blake Jacobsen.

(left Blake Jacobsen as John Deeriere.)

This article is part of Out's September/October 2022 issue, out on newsstands August 30. Support queer media and subscribe -- or download the issue through Amazon, Kindle, Nook, or Apple News.

(Blake Jacobsen as John Deeriere)

"Baptism (2020)" from taking care of roots by Blake Jacobsen

"In your image (2020)" from taking care of roots by Blake Jacobsen.

"My brother can't be a father (2020)" from taking care of roots by Blake Jacobsen.

"Learning to carry weight (2020)" from taking care of roots by Blake Jacobsen

"Family reunion (2020)" from taking care of roots by Blake Jacobsen