Tom of Finland
Touko Valio Laaksonen, known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized erotic art featuring hypermasculinity, and influenced late 20th-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 sexual traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
Early life
Laaksonen was born on 8 May 1920 and raised by a middle-class family in Kaarina, a town in southwestern Finland, near the city of Turku. Both of his parents Suoma and Edwin Laaksonen were schoolteachers at the grammar school that served Kaarina. The family lived in the school building's attached living quarters.He went to school in Turku and in 1939, at the age of 19, he moved to Helsinki to study advertising. In his spare time he also started drawing erotic images for his own pleasure, based on images of male laborers he had seen from an early age. At first he kept these drawings hidden, but then destroyed them "at least by the time I went to serve the army." The country became embroiled in the Winter War with the Soviet Union, and then became formally involved in World War II, and he was conscripted in February 1940 into the Finnish Army. He served as an anti-aircraft officer, holding the rank of second lieutenant. He later attributed his fetishistic interest in uniformed men to encounters with men in army uniform, especially soldiers of the German Wehrmacht serving in Finland at that time. He said, "In my drawings I have no political statements to make, no ideology. I am thinking only about the picture itself. The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course I drew them anyway—they had the sexiest uniforms!" After the war, in 1945, he returned to studies.
Laaksonen's artwork of this period compared to later works is considered more romantic and softer with "gentle-featured shapes and forms". The men featured were middle-class, as opposed to the sailors, bikers, lumberjacks, construction workers, and other members of stereotypically hypermasculine working class groups that feature in 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.
Career
In 1956 Laaksonen submitted drawings to the American magazine Physique Pictorial, which premiered the images in the 1957 Spring issue under the pseudonym Tom, as it resembled his given name Touko. In the Winter issue later that year, editor Bob Mizer coined the credit Tom of Finland. One of his pieces was featured on the Spring 1957 cover, depicting two log drivers at work with a third man watching them. Inspired by lumberjacks representing strong masculinity in Finnish culture, Laaksonen emphasized "homoerotic potentiality relocating it in a gay context", a strategy repeated throughout his career.The post-World War II era saw the rise of the biker subculture as rejecting "the reorganization 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. This was in contrast to the then-prevailing stereotypes of the gay man as effeminate, as seen in vaudeville and films going back to the first years of the industry. Laaksonen was influenced by images of bikers as well as artwork of George Quaintance and Etienne, among others, that he cited as his precursors, "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 in contrast with the mainstream, medically and psychologically 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," which may have led to them being widely distributed and popularized within those cultures. He worked at an advertising agency in the 1960s.
U.S. censorship codes (1950s–1960s)
Laaksonen's style and content in the late 1950s and early 1960s was partly influenced by the U.S. censorship codes that restricted depiction of "overt homosexual acts". His work was published in the beefcake genre that began in the 1930s and predominantly featured photographs of attractive, muscular young men in athletic poses often shown demonstrating exercises. Their primary market was gay men, but because of the conservative and homophobic social culture of the era, gay pornography was illegal and the publications were typically presented as dedicated to physical fitness and health. They were often the only connection that closeted men had to their sexuality. By this time, however, Laaksonen was rendering private commissions, so more explicit work was produced but remained unpublished. Aside from his work at an advertising agency, Laaksonen operated a small mail-order business, distributing reproductions of his artwork around the world by post, though he did not generate much income this way.In the 1962 case of MANual Enterprises v. Day the United States Supreme Court ruled that nude male photographs were not inherently obscene. Softcore gay pornography magazines and films featuring fully nude models, some of them tumescent, quickly appeared and the pretense of being about exercise and fitness was dropped as controls on pornography were reduced. By the end of the 1960s the market for beefcake magazines collapsed. Laaksonen was able to publish his more overtly erotic work and it changed the context with "new possibilities and conventions for displaying frontal male nudity in magazines and movies." Laaksonen reacted by publishing more explicit drawings and stylized his figures' fantastical aspects with exaggerated physical aspects, particularly their genitals and muscles. In the late 1960s he developed Kake, a recurring fictional character that appeared in 26 comics from 1968 to 1986.
Gay mainstream appeal (1970s–1991)
With the decriminalization of male nudity, gay pornography became more mainstream in gay cultures, and Laaksonen's work along with it. By 1973, he was publishing erotic comic books and making inroads to the mainstream art world with exhibitions. In 1973 he gave up his full-time job at the Helsinki office of advertising agency McCann. "Since then I've lived in jeans and lived on my drawings," is how he described the lifestyle transition which occurred during this period.By the mid-1970s he was also emphasizing a photorealistic style, making aspects of the drawings appear more photographic. Many of his drawings are based on photographs, but none are exact reproductions of them. The photographic inspiration is used, on the one hand, to create lifelike, almost moving images, with convincing and active postures and gestures while Laaksonen exaggerates physical features and presents his ideal of masculine beauty and sexual allure, combining realism with fantasy. In Daddy and the Muscle Academy – The Art, Life, and Times of Tom of Finland examples of photographs and the drawings based upon them are shown side by side. Although he considered the photographs to be merely reference tools for his drawings, contemporary art students have seen them as complete works of art that stand on their own.
In 1979, Laaksonen, with businessman and friend Durk Dehner, co-founded the Tom of Finland Company to preserve the copyright on his art, which had been widely pirated. Tom was introduced to Dehner by his pen pal and fellow erotic artist Dom Orejudos. Also in 1979, Laaksonen and Lou Thomas published Target by Tom; The Natural Man, a series of photographs and drawings of adult performers including Bruno, Jeremy Brent, Chuck Gatlin, and Steve Sartori.
In 1984 the Tom of Finland Foundation was established to collect, preserve and exhibit androerotic art. Although Laaksonen was quite successful at this point, with his biography on the best-seller list, and Benedikt Taschen, the world's largest art book publisher reprinting and expanding a monograph of his works, he was most proud of the Foundation. The scope of the organization expanded to erotic works of all types, sponsored contests, exhibits, and started the groundwork for a museum of erotic art.
Laaksonen developed a "wonderfully rich relationship" with Bill Schmeling during the 1980s when they lived in Los Angeles; the two men set up artist salons in their homes and shared artistic practices as well as life experiences. Schmeling cited Laaksonen as having considerably influenced his artistic style.
Personal life
Laaksonen was diagnosed with emphysema in 1988. Eventually the disease and medication caused his hands to tremble, leading him to switch media from pencil to pastel. He died in 1991 of an emphysema-induced stroke. Laaksonen's romantic partner was the dancer Veli "Nipa" Mäkinen with whom he shared his life for 28 years until Mäkinen's death in 1981.Reception
When examining the reception of Laaksonen's art, it is impossible to separate it from its original purpose. His "dirty drawings", as he himself called them, served primarily as gay erotica, intended to arouse the viewer. As described by Rob Meijer, owner of a leathershop and art gallery in Amsterdam, "These works are not conversation pieces, they're masturbation pieces." Many of his drawings were published in publications like Physique Pictorial, or were advertisements and murals for bath houses, leather bars and clubs, which were erotically charged or explicitly sexual spaces.They also contributed to the spread of a new gay masculinity and confidence. In oral histories, for example, the works of Laaksonen are repeatedly described as influential for one's own sexual biography. Many men identified with his characters, who were pictured as masculine, virile and often blue-collar, thus defeating homophobic stereotypes of effeminacy. Kate Wolf writes that "Tom of Finland helped pave the way to gay liberation".
Laaksonen's drawings were particularly popular in the flourishing leather subculture of the 1950s to 1970s. Tom's drawings were central to the development and dissemination of a more unified gay leather aesthetic, resulting in the so-called "clone look" of the 1970s and 1980s.
During his lifetime and beyond, Laaksonen's work has drawn both admiration and disdain from different quarters of the artistic community. Laaksonen developed a friendship with gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work depicting sado-masochism and fetish iconography was also subject to controversy.
A controversial theme in his drawings was the erotic treatment of men in Nazi uniforms. They form a small part of his overall work, but the typically flattering visual treatment of these characters has led some viewers to infer sympathy or affinity for Nazism, and they have been omitted from most recent anthologies of his work. Later in his career Laaksonen disavowed this work and was at pains to dissociate himself and his work from fascist or racist ideologies. He also depicted a significant number of black men in his drawings.
Sheila Jeffreys offers a radical feminist critique of Laaksonen's work in her 2003 book Unpacking Queer Politics. 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". Writing for Artforum, Kevin Killian said that seeing Tom of Finland originals "produces a strong respect for his nimble, witty creation".