“For years, I followed the Personals. They evidenced a depth of need, a longing for connection. I deluded myself into thinking these ads had nothing to do with me.”

So began artist Lee Brozgol’s creative odyssey through the back pages of America’s most explicit erotic personal columns, starting in the early 1980’s.

His subsequent drawings and profound snail mail correspondences with a vast range of LGBTQIA+, Hetero-spectrum, and other identifying peoples, would consume Brozgol for the next 30 years.

Hidden America is a correspondence-based series of works on paper. In its entirety, Hidden America forms a shockingly intimate, composite portrait of desire in late Twentieth Century America.

The first drawing, Hidden America: Florida was done in 1985. The series concludes in 2017 with Hidden America: South Carolina. Each work on paper was based solely on correspondence with a personal column advertiser — each from a different State.

In 2006, a partially completed Hidden America, representing 35 states was exhibited at the University of Alabama, under the pseudonym Alex Lebowski.

Select images below.