Queer Places:
1421 Laveta Terrace, Los Angeles, CA 90026
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 fetish 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.[1]
Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3500 illustrations, mostly
featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight
or partially removed clothing.
Laaksonen was born and raised by a middle-class family in Kaarina, a town
in southwestern Finland, near the city of Turku.[2]
Both of his parents were schoolteachers at the grammar school that served
Kaarina. The family lived in the school building's attached living quarters.[3]
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,[2]
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."[4]
The country became embroiled in the Winter War with the USSR, and then became
formally involved in World War II, and he was conscripted in February 1940
into the Finnish Army.[2]
He served as an anti-aircraft officer, holding the rank of second lieutenant.[5]
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. "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!"[6]
After the war, in 1945, he returned to studies.[2]
TOM OF FINLAND (TOUKO VALIO LAAKSONEN, 1920-1991)
Fucker.
Graphite on paper with fixative. 292x210 mm; 11 1/2x8 1/2 inches. Signed "Tom" in ink, lower right image. 1965. Tipped to mount, archivally framed.
An early and classic image from Tom's bar and bikers sequence, which includes the characters that would appear in his most famous creation, Kake, in 1968.
Tom of Finland Foundation catalogue Number 65.03.
Provenance: Exhibited and sold, Robert Samuel Gallery, New York City, 1980, to current owner.
Published: Dian Hanson, Tom of Finland, Cologne: Taschen, 1998, page 216; Tom of Finland: The Art of Pleasure, Cologne: Taschen, 1998, page 104.
TOM OF FINLAND (TOUKO VALIO LAAKSONEN, 1920-1991)
Falcon's Lair.
Offset poster, 565x440 cm, 22 1/4x17 1/4 inches. Circa 1970s.
Laaksonen's artwork of this period compared to later works is considered
more romantic and softer with "gentle-featured shapes and forms."[2]
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.[2]
Another key difference is the lack of dramatic compositions, self-assertive
poses, muscular bodies and "detached exotic settings" that his later work
embodied.[2]
In 1956 Laaksonen submitted drawings to the influential 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.[7]
One of his pieces was featured on the Spring 1957 cover, depicting two log
drivers at work with a third man watching them.[2]
Pulled from the Finnish mythology of lumberjacks representing strong
masculinity, Laaksonen emphasized and privileged "homoerotic potentiality
[...] relocating it in a gay context", a strategy repeated throughout his
career.[2]
The post-World War II era saw the rise of the biker culture as rejecting
"the reorganization and normalization of life after the war, with its
conformist, settled lifestyle."[8][9]
Biker subculture was both marginal and oppositional and provided postwar gay
men with a stylized masculinity that included rebelliousness and danger.[8]
This was in contrast to the then-prevailing stereotypes of gay man as an
effeminate sissy, as seen in vaudeville and films going back to the first
years of the industry.[10]
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.[11][8]
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.[12][13]
This in contrast with the mainstream, medical and psychological sad and
sensitive young gay man who is passive.[13][14]
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 within
those cultures.[15]
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".[15]
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.[16]
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.[16]
They were often the only connection that closeted men had to their sexuality.[16]
By this time, however, Laaksonen was rendering private commissions, so more
explicit work was produced but remained unpublished.[15]
In the 1962 case of MANual Enterprises v. Day the United States
Supreme Court ruled that nude male photographs were not inherently obscene.[17]
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.[16][18]
By the end of the 1960s the market for beefcake magazines collapsed.[16]
Laaksonen was able to publish his more overtly homoerotic work and it changed
the context with "new possibilities and conventions for displaying frontal
male nudity in magazines and movies."[15]
Laaksonen reacted by publishing more explicit drawings and stylized his
figures' fantastical aspects with exaggerated physical aspects, particularly
their genitals and muscles.[15]
In the late 1960s he developed Kake, a character appearing in an ongoing
series of comics, which debuted in 1968.
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 McCann-Erickson, an international advertising firm. "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.[15]
Many of his drawings are based on photographs, but none are exact
reproductions of them.[19]
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.[19]
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.[19]
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.[20]
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. In 1984 the Tom of Finland Foundation was established to
collect, preserve, and exhibit homoerotic artwork.[21]
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.[22]
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.[22]
Laaksonen was diagnosed with emphysema in 1988. Eventually the disease and
medication caused his hands to tremble, leading him to switch mediums from
pencil to pastels. He died in 1991 due to an emphysema-induced stroke.[5]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_of_Finland
- Hidden Histories, 20th Century Male Same Sex Lovers in the Visual
Arts, by Michael Petry