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In addition to baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, The Outfield also takes a swing at golf, cricket, tennis, rugby, archery, the Olympics, soccer, and a host of other wholesome athletic endeavors. By 1973, however, he was earning enough money to quit his day job at the advertising agency and devote himself fully to drawing. Some early Tom of Finland illustrations depicting soldiers in Nazi uniforms are also inherently problematic.
While it might be argued that Tom of Finland reinforces the stereotype of the hypersexual black male, it’s also fair to say that his white males were heavily sexualised too.
However, if these elements of his work are inspiringly subversive, the way Tom of Finland plays with imagery from the Third Reich is undoubtedly much more morally murky – even though Laaksonen unequivocally dismissed suggestions he might be a Nazi sympathiser.
“Tom of Finland is clearly a reaction against that,” Bengry asserts. Many of his illustrations show men with heavily muscled torsos and surreally large genitalia engaging gleefully in sex acts. The Outfield collects the entire run of Dylan Edwards’ ... Read more
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It’s also become a globally recognised brand to the extent that you can now buy a Tom of Finland tea towel on Amazon. “His work captures a raw sexual energy that’s unashamed, punk, rebellious, fantastical, sleazy and most importantly very funny,” says drag performer Chris Weller, aka Baby Lame. Equally, Tom of Finland continues to inspire creatives and fashion designers.
Even if Laaksonen’s drawings now seem to perpetuate the stereotype of gay men as inherently sexual and supremely body-conscious, they were once groundbreaking for this very reason.
“Pop culture representations of gay and queer men in the first half of the 20th Century are dominated by the image of the ‘pansy’,” says Dr Justin Bengry, who runs the Queer History course at Goldsmiths, University of London.
“I don't think Physique Pictorial had much of a straight male audience,” says Bengry. Laaksonen had been drawing for his own pleasure since the 30s, but in 1956 he submitted one of his efforts to the American beefcake magazine Physique Pictorial and had it published – that was when editor Bob Mizer gave him the pseudonym ‘Tom of Finland’.
Though publications like Physique Pictorial were ostensibly presented as bodybuilding manuals celebrating the male form, many were essentially purveyors of gay erotica hiding in plain sight.
Even when he was allowed to “get one over on everyone else”, he was inevitably held up as exemplifying a kind of “failed masculinity”. Both curator Ahmad and Hicks hail his work as “revolutionary”.
“At the time when I became aware of my sexual orientation, before World War Two, all gay activity was forbidden by law in most countries,” Laaksonen writes in the preface to his 1988 book, Retrospective I. Laaksonen, born in 1920 and raised by schoolteacher parents in a small town in southwestern Finland, says the first gay men he encountered “felt ashamed and guilty, like [they were] belonging to a lower human category” as a result of the prejudice they faced.
During the 1960s, he worked at an advertising agency in Helsinki during the day, then created his beloved ‘dirty drawings’ at night. “He’s showing that homoerotic desire can be masculine, valid, fun and playful.”
Tom of Finland’s gleeful and very gay brand of sexual freedom still resonates today – more than 60 years after his first drawing was published.
Art historian Dr James Hicks says Tom of Finland is sometimes overlooked in the mainstream art world because “his work is dangerous and is meant to be dangerous”.
Equally, Tom of Finland’s deification of a certain type of gay man – muscular and avowedly masculine – hasn’t necessarily endeared him to all corners of the LGBTQ community. But as his reputation continues to swell it’s hard to deny that he achieved his primary aim: “I want to show that gays can feel happy together – that they have a right to be happy together.”
Tom of Finland: Love and Liberation at House of Illustration is currently closed but will reopen as soon as it is safe to do so (www.houseofillustration.org.uk)
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And this month, the UK’s first public exhibition dedicated solely to his work opened at London’s House of Illustration (though the gallery is currently closed due to the Coronavirus crisis). In 2014, the Finnish postal service even celebrated his impact with a set of commemorative postage stamps.