Philadelphia – Jennifer Easton, a mathematics student at the University of West Chester, recently noticed something strange about a poster that was hung prominently in her six-year-old niece’s bedroom. The poster was a list of all 26 letters of the English alphabet, accompanied with illustrations of animals that started with the corresponding first letter- “A” for alligator, “B” for baboon, etc.
The learning guide was first published in 1956 by renowned children’s author and illustrator Daniel Henrik and has been in continual reprintings since the late nineteen-sixties. During his lifetime Henrik published several classic children’s books including The Mouse that Caught the Cat and Squirrels, Squirrels Everywhere, that are still in print today, have sold a combined 33 million copies and have been translated to over 17 languages. What caught Easton’s eye, however, was not the illustrations of the animals but rather the direction of their faces.
“I was taking an introductory course on cryptography at university and on one of the first days of class, my professor gave an example of a code invented by Francis Bacon in 1605. Then, when I was using my niece’s bedroom as a makeshift office during COVID, I took a short mental break one day and started looking around at the room’s décor and that’s when it struck me.”
The faces of the animals on the poster were all either facing to the left or the right. Francis Bacon’s code, called a biliteral cipher, could utilize this information to encode a message. In this code, each of the 26 letters of the alphabet can be encoded using five bits of information with values either equal to A or B. Getting out a pen and paper, Easton quickly wrote down the series of letters according to directions of the animals faces, “A” for animals facing to the right and “B” for animals looking to the left and soon had a string of characters.
ABAAAABBAAAABBAAAAAABBAAAA
Using a modified Baconian cipher as it is now known, Easton was shocked to discover that the poster did in fact contain a message. The message? “I’m gay.”
“As soon as I saw the message, my first reaction was that I must have made some type of error so I rechecked, and sure enough, I got the same message. Obviously, I knew this couldn’t be an accident.”
Born on January 9th, 1924 in New York City to Dutch immigrant parents, Henrik was a mediocre student throughout high school but always had a passion for art, in which he excelled. After barely graduating, he enrolled in the City University of New York majoring in Fine Art where he completed three semesters before dropping out to pursue a career in advertising. Then after freelancing as an illustrator for several years, he found success when his first children’s book, Moose on the Loose, was published in 1949.
According to the Henrik Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of his legacy and work, Henrik was indeed a homosexual but didn’t publicly come out until 1988, a mere twelve years before his death. When Easton reached out to the Henrik Foundation with her discovery, Charles Yannick, a personal friend and the foundation’s archivist, he was surprised but not shocked.
“Daniel Henrik was known to occasionally hide messages and items within his work, but this is the first time that we have a concrete example of him declaring his homosexuality through his artwork prior to 1988. Encoding this message in such a public venue during the height of the Lavender Scare and homophobic culture of the 1950’s was both incredibly tragic and courageous. It’s tragic in that he felt the need to hide his sexuality for the real fear of reprisals including jail time, harassment, and career suicide that he would have endured at this time in American history, but courageous in the sense that he published it at all- at a time when doing so was fraught with danger.”
Yannick concluded “From previous conversations with those closest to Henrik before his death in 1996, including his long-time partner, Christopher Lalli, this is just the sort of thing that Daniel loved doing though and he would relish the thought of a whole new generation enjoying and studying his artwork.”
As for Easton, she is just happy that she stumbled upon the message and that she can now forever be a footnote in the beloved author and illustrator’s history. “Sometimes, it really can be as simple as the A, B, C’s.”
Editor’s Note: The original version of this story incorrectly identified Henrik’s parents as German immigrants. This has been corrected to Dutch.
Truth Bureau 