written by M.D. Cabot layout by Shay Suban CW: mentions of suicide, sex Special thanks to the Tom of Finland Foundation for supplying me with some of the more hard-to-find illustrations. You have been a wonderful support team. Much love to Durk, Sharp, Marti (+ Cleo), Dan, Louie, Toni, Marc, and the rest of the team!
Some call Tom of Finland the daddy of gay culture. He’s engineered a central motif: the leatherman — one that has stuck itself to the core of the hypermasculine gay identity. This fetishist archetype has had enormous influence on queer identities and communities. For years, many critics have believed that Tom’s “dirty drawings” — as he liked to call them — are distasteful or too explicit, but it is important to recognize that his images changed the gay community’s self-image. Tom, born Touko Laaksonen in 1920, had many influencers that helped him to shape his stylized, intensely sexualized and fetishistic drawings. Raised in the southwestern Finnish countryside by a pair of schoolteachers, he was neighbor to farmers, loggers, and other male laborers: the first major inspiration for his illustrations. His first crush was a muscular farmhand (“Urho,” meaning hero) on whom Tom began to spy when he was just 5 years old. If not for Lady Godiva, I would have thought ‘peeping Tom’ was coined by Tom of Finland! After moving to Helsinki in 1939 for art school, big city life exposed Tom to a melting pot of masculine beauty; he took an 14 | OutWrite, 2019