Tom of Finland – The Gay Icon Who Changed Pop Culture Forever
The legendary queer artist is famous for his photo-realistic drawings of gay men enjoying sex. Tom of Finland’s impact on gay culture is hard to overstate, but the story of his life is less well known.
Touko Valio Laaksonen (8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991), best known by his pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist known for his stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and for his influence on late twentieth century gay culture. He has been called the “most influential creator of gay pornographic images” by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade.
Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
When Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland, began publishing and exhibiting his drawings of muscled and mustachioed gay men in the 1950s, his artwork was still illegal in many places.
Tom of Finland artist Touko Laaksonen
Anti-gay censorship laws meant he and his collectors could be imprisoned for owning same-sex erotica. But over the course of his artistic career, which spanned more than 60 years and produced over 3,500 works, Tom of Finland inspired a legion of queer artists and changed the way the world views gay masculinity and sexuality.
ABOUT TOM OF FINLAND
The Life of the Artist
Tom of Finland is the artist name of Finnish Touko Laaksonen (1920, Kaarina – 1991, Helsinki). He signed his erotic work “Tom”, and when his drawings were first published in 1957, the now world-famous “Tom of Finland” was born. “Touko Laaksonen” was kept for family and colleagues; both friends and fans have always simply called him “Tom”.
Tom of Finland’s given name was Touko – because he was born on 8th May 1920, on the southwest coast of Finland, and May in Finnish is “Toukokuu”.
Tom of Finland and a cultural icon was born
In 1956, he submitted an illustration of a muscular lumberjack with a bulging crotch to Physique Pictorial, an American magazine that passed itself off as a sports rag to skirt censorship. It was popular with gay men who’d lust after the nude or semi-nude bodies of the muscled models.
To protect his identity, Laaksonen simply signed the work “Tom.” When the drawing landed on the cover in the spring of 1957, the editors changed his name to “Tom of Finland,” and a cultural icon was born.
In the 50s and 60s, beefcake art focused on depictions of beautiful male bodies, sometimes in proximity to one another, but never interacting in a sexual sense. “What Tom recognized was that a lot of the depictions [in queer culture] were beefcake,” S.R. Sharp, the Vice President of the Tom of Finland Foundation, told.
“We were just voyeurs looking at models that we didn’t know anything about. Were they just models? Were they gay? Were they straight? Were they being paid? We didn’t know. We were just voyeurs looking at beefcake. Tom said, ‘I can fix that,’ and so he made a deliberate effort to bring beefcake into [fine art,]” Sharp added.
But who was the man behind the leather?
This movie tells it; Tom of Finland movie. Director Dome Karukoski’s stirring biopic follows his life from the trenches of WWII and repressive Finnish society of the 1950s through his struggle to get his work published in California, where he and his art were finally embraced amid the sexual revolution of the 1970s.
Tom’s story is one of love, courage and perseverance, mirroring the gay liberation movement for which his leather-clad studs served as a defiant emblem.
Very few artists were working in the same way as Tom of Finland, injecting same-sex lust and tension into their art. But it’s worth noting that Roland Caillaux, a lesser known actor and artist, was creating similar work in Paris a decade before Tom of Finland found success.
He was treading similar ground, depicting men in naval uniforms and states of undress. They were leaner than Laaksonen’s, but had the same gaze about them, fondling one another and engaging in sex. But with a groundswell of American support, Tom of Finland became more widely shared, sparking kinship and recognition in the men who viewed his art.
“It made it so we could see a relationship, and even if you were in a small town and you were 15 years old and didn’t know how to identify yourself, you knew there was a similarity between yourself and what you were seeing on paper,” Sharp explained.
That recognition translated into visibility for the queer community and helped lay the blueprint, in part, for leather and fetish communities that were beginning to form.
Etienne and Robert Mapplethorpe
In the 1970s, men were using the art to re-enact scenes that Laaksonen had experienced during the war, finding each other in seedy bars, alleys, and cruising spots in parks around the world. They dressed themselves like Tom of Finland characters, starting “motorcycle clubs with no motorcycles” that were the beginnings of the leather community.
In addition to this generation of gay men, his work influenced a generation of artists. As Laaksonen began spending more time in America, he grew close to artists like Etienne and Robert Mapplethorpe, inviting them to his home for salons and viewings, since opportunities to show their work at public institutions were scarce. “I think Tom gave them permission to use erotica as a part of their practice,” Sharp said. “He made them think that they could examine what they were doing and know that they could incorporate sexuality into their work.”
Their art changed the visuals of queer culture, not only by showing work in magazines and later galleries, but also by doing the graphics for iconic fetish clubs like Mineshaft and The Lure, gay bathhouses, and a variety of other queer establishments. That influence continues to resonate with artists today, as noted in books like My Gay Eye, which includes current working artists like Gio Black Peter, who recently helped conceptualize the artistic direction for the legendary New York queer fetish event The Black Party.
Tom of Finland’s enduring legacy is woven into a new exhibition, TOM House: The Work and Life of Tom of Finland , within Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Featuring a newly-built fireplace and oriental rugs, the single-story ranch house has been redecorated to look like the TOM House in Echo Park, Los Angeles, where Laaksonen spent half of each year in the final decade of his life. It was the space where he socialized and interacted with many of the queer artists he influenced.
At MOCAD, Tom of Finland pieces hang alongside work by Mapplethorpe, Raymond Pettibon, John Waters, and other contemporaries influenced by his art. Early drawings and reference materials—Laaksonen’s work was often an amalgamation of his imagination and men in his life—are shown alongside more polished drawings.
One hallway features his Pleasure Park series, depicting a figure named Kake on a cruising trip-turned-orgy in the woods. In the garage, four vitrines feature ephemera, like fliers from 1999 for the punk band Limp Wrist featuring appropriated Tom of Finland illustrations.
IMAGES: Tom of Finland Foundation, Wikipedia
Tom of Finland movie
This movie tells it; Tom of Finland movie. Director Dome Karukoski’s stirring biopic follows his life from the trenches of WWII and repressive Finnish society of the 1950s through his struggle to get his work published in California, where he and his art were finally embraced amid the sexual revolution of the 1970s.
Tom’s story is one of love, courage and perseverance, mirroring the gay liberation movement for which his leather-clad studs served as a defiant emblem.
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