Tom of Finland

Ever heard of Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen)?  If not, you’re probably familiar with his very distinctive drawing style, notable for its androerotic and fetish art and influence on late twentieth century gay culture.  Laaksonen (1920-1991), a Finnish artist, 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 3500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits with tight or partially removed clothing.

Laaksonen's artwork compared to later works is considered more romantic and softer with "gentle-featured shapes and forms".  The men featured were middle-class compared to the lower-class sailors, bikers, lumberjacks, construction workers, etc. of his later work.  Another key difference is the lack of dramatic compositions, self-assertive poses, muscular bodies and "detached exotic settings" that his later work embodied.  Laaksonen emphasized and privileged "homoerotic potentiality [...] relocating it in a gay context", a strategy repeated throughout his career.

Post World War II saw the rise of the biker culture as rejecting "the organization and normalization of life after the war, with its conformist, settled lifestyle."  Biker subculture was both marginal and oppositional and provided postwar gay men with a stylized masculinity that included rebelliousness and danger which were absent from dominant gay stereotypes.  Laaksonen was influenced by images of bikers as well as artwork of George Quaintance and Etienne, among others, that he cited as his precursors; they were "disseminated to gay readership through homoerotic physique magazines" starting in 1950.  Laaksonen's drawings of bikers and leathermen capitalized on the leather and denim outfits which differentiated those men from mainstream culture and suggested they were untamed, physical, and self-empowered.  This is contrasted with the mainstream, medical and psychological sad and sensitive young gay man who is passive.  Laaksonen's drawings of this time "can be seen as consolidating an array of factors, styles and discourses already existing in the 1950s gay subcultures," this may have led to them being widely distributed and popularized in gay culture.

He is best known for works that focused on homomasculine archetypes such as lumberjacks, motorcycle policemen, sailors, bikers, and leathermen.  His most prominent comic series are the "Kake" comics, which included these archetypal characters in abundance.  Laaksonen's work had predominantly been segmented to private collectors and collections seen only by consumers who sought out the underground gay pornography industry.  With the decriminalization of male nudity gay pornography became more mainstream in gay cultures. Laaksonen's drawings also came to the attention of mainstream gay communities, and by 1973, he was both publishing erotic comic books and making inroads to the mainstream art world with exhibitions.

Tom of Finland shot many of the photographs he used as reference for his drawings; he considered them only as a tool.  Contemporary art students have seen them as complete works of art that stand on their own.  In 1995, Tom of Finland Clothing Company introduced a fashion line based on his works, which covers a wide array of looks besides the typified cutoff-jeans-and-jacket style of his drawings. The fashion line balances the original homoeroticism of the drawings with mainstream fashion culture, and their runway shows occur in many of the venues during the same times as other fashion companies.

During his lifetime and beyond, Laaksonen's work has drawn both admiration and disdain from different quarters of the artistic community.  Art critics have mixed views about Laaksonen's work.  His detailed drawing technique has led to him being described as a 'master with a pencil', while in contrast a reviewer for Dutch newspaper Het Parool described his work as 'illustrative but without expressivity'.  There is considerable argument over whether his depiction of 'supermen' (male characters with huge sexual organs and muscles) is facile and distasteful, or whether there is a deeper complexity in the work which plays with and subverts those stereotypes.  For example, some critics have noted examples of apparent tenderness between traditionally tough, masculine characters, or playful smiles in sado-masochistic scenes.

In either case, there remains a large constituency who admire the work on a purely utilitarian basis, as described by Rob Meijer, owner of a leathershop and art gallery in Amsterdam, "These works are not conversation pieces, they're masturbation pieces."  In 2006, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City accepted five drawings as part of a donation from a private foundation, and one of the foundation’s trustees commented, “As an artist he was superb, as an influence, he was transcendent.”