TOM OF FINLAND CENTENARY
As official media partner to the Tom of Finland centennial, Attitude is proudly celebrating the life of the influential creative. Cliff Joannou meets Tom’s partner Durk Dehner to discuss the artist’s enduring legacy
We celebrate the 100th anniversary of the queer icon’s birth
Iwas a teenager with barely one foot out of the closet when I’d regularly get a bus into central London to wander the buzzing area around Old Compton Street and seek out gay life. ( My home town of Croydon wasn’t exactly overflowing with queer abandon.) In a particular bookshop I liked to visit, there was a gay section mostly comprising somewhat generic photography books containing pictures of naked dudes on a beach or by a pool, glaring Blue Steel- like into the camera lens. It was low- budget, tacky pin- up material.
Among these, a black- and- white book featuring illustrations of buff naked men stood out. As a comic- book fan since the age of five, it seized my attention. It could have been that these pictures looked like the superheroes of my X- Men comics, unclothed. Or the simple fact that the people in these drawings looked at me in a way that the men in those other, more brazen photography books didn’t. There was a joy in the faces of these illustrated men that felt counter to the anti- gay culture that I was growing up in.
The spine on the book was damaged and some of the inside pages were loose and tatty, but I paid £ 10 for what was, unbeknown to me, a first printing of one of the Tom of Finland Retrospective series, showcasing one of the gay world’s most highly regarded artists. I went home and researched his work further, delving deeper into his life story. Since Tom’s death in November 1991, his artwork has maintained an underground allure and remained everpresent in queer cultural references, but the past decade has seen a huge revival in the appreciation of his talent, with his work included in major fashion collaborations, a vodka, bed linen and even a postage stamp collection in his native Finland.
Even putting aside the astonishing artistry in Tom’s illustrations – each piece could take him two weeks to create – and simply admiring his work for depicting men in unrestrained sexual acts or affectionate scenarios, his influence has been critical in shaping contemporary gay imagery.
Tom of Finland, birth name Touko
Valio Laaksonen, was born in the small southwestern town of Kaarina, Finland, on 8 May 1920. Following the Second World War, when he was conscripted into the Finnish army, he continued his studies in advertising, before joining the international advertising firm McCann Erickson in the 1960s as art director for the Helsinki division.
“My aim is not to create an ideal but to draw beautiful men who love each other and are proud of it” Tom of Finland
His illustrations were a side project, until he established a big enough name for himself to step back from his day job in the mid 1970s and to relish the pleasure that came with being a full- time artist.
“I discovered his art in a bar when I moved to New York City in 1976,” recollects Durk Dehner, who was then a 26- year- old model and is now president and co- founder of the Tom of Finland Foundation. “I saw a small poster of his work on the wall and I just gravitated towards it. It was even more than just liking it; I had never had art speak to me in such a personal way. I stole the little poster off the wall of the bar, and showed it to another artist the following day. He said, ‘ Well, I have his address if you want to write him a fan letter.’ So that’s what I did. I wrote him a fan letter, and he responded and we became pen pals.”
The following year, Durk moved back to the
West Coast. He would meet Tom for the first time when he offered to host the artist during his Los Angeles exhibition in 1978.
“So many young men were coming up to Tom and acknowledging him for the influence that he had had on their lives,” says Durk. “I realised very quickly that this man was much more than just a good artist, that he had been an influencer, that he had really affected the way that we had developed. Out of that I really had this desire to do what I could to make his life better.”
Durk was determined to help push Tom’s profile even further into queer culture. He had a simple goal: to find out what Tom’s needs were, what he wanted to accomplish and to work out how he could make it happen. Exhibitions were planned around the US, and the Tom of Finland Co. was set up as a mail order and publishing company. The non- profit Tom of Finland Foundation was established in 1984 to archive Tom’s expansive art collection
“I know my little ‘ dirty drawings’ are never going to hang in the main salons of the Louvre, but it would be nice if — I would like to say ‘ when,’ but I better say ‘ if’ — our world learns to accept all the different ways of loving. Then maybe I could have a place in one of the smaller side rooms” Tom of Finland
and to publish the Retrospectives book series. They have 3,500 finished and 1,500 preparatory drawings in their catalogue, while the first Retrospectives publication sold more than 40,000 copies out of a garage, and went on to be reprinted three times.
Tom was 58 when he met Durk, and the pair enjoyed 13 years together before he passed away at the age of 71. “I was able to give him the pleasures of that California lifestyle and having lots of friends,” Durk says. “He developed a beautiful throng of guys that were not just fans, but became his friends. He got to do things that he didn’t get to do when he was younger. That was wonderful, and I felt really good that I could give him that.
“For his age, Tom was really open- minded and willing to explore new horizons. I turned him to smoking marijuana, and he even experimented with Quaaludes and [ other] different drugs. He and I had a relationship that was really multilevel. We had sex with each other, we were best friends, we were business partners. I was his manager. There was a lot of different hats that I wore with him. I didn’t feel like our age difference was really a problem.”
Tom and Durk would go out on the scene together, or Durk would drop Tom off at a bar and pick him up later that evening. Sometimes Tom would have met somebody that he wanted to bring back home.
“It’s important that I say he was Finnish because Finns are extremely humble people,” Durk answers when we talk about Tom’s character. “They’re stubborn as hell, but they’re not overstated, and Tom wasn’t shy. He could be introduced to a new situation and he would acclimatise and be able to carry on a conversation very well. Except the thing that Finns have is they don’t mind being quiet, they don’t over- talk. They can certainly be in a room where there’s silence and it doesn’t make them uncomfortable, and he had that quality also.”
It’s a hot Sunday spring morning in Los Angeles and I’m strolling the streets around
Echo Park where quirky coffee shops and vintage clothing stores line the streets. I head up the winding roads to visit TOM House at 1421 Laveta Terrace, where the team at the Tom of Finland Foundation are preparing to commemorate one hundred years since Tom’s birth.
A tall fence and overhanging trees hide the house from street view, but once past the unfussy wooden gates, the house’s bohemian vibe sits comfortably alongside Tom’s personal relationship with Los Angeles. The architecture of the house remains almost unchanged over the decades: heavy wooden beams run across the ceilings, and the art nouveau chandeliers add a quaint charm. The
City Council designated Tom’s former home as a ‘ Historic- Cultural Monument’ in November 2016, further preserving Tom’s link to the city that so warmly embraced him.
The rear gardens unfurl behind TOM House. There’s the Gold Pavilion, a salon area for readings and discussions, a fully stocked bar for parties, and the wall of a huge storage container has been given a Tom of Finland makeover. Tom’s energy exudes from every plant, chair, awning, tree.
Beyond managing the artist’s creative output, the Foundation’s scope was widened to offer a safe haven for all erotic art, a response to rampant discrimination against artworks that portrayed sexual behaviour or generated a sexual response. Today, one of the Foundation’s aims is to continue to educate the public in the cultural merits of erotic art and to promote healthier, more tolerant attitudes towards sexuality.
“We work with other artists, we have drawing workshops. We do an art fair here every year, we have emerging erotic artist contests, and we have an artist in residency programme,” S R Sharp, vice- president and curator at the Foundation, tells me as we sit in the sunshine enjoying a glass of red wine in the shade of the lemon and orange trees. “Oh, and we have a lovely cat, her name is Pearl,” he adds with a grin as Pearl brushes around my legs.
On the day of my visit, some 20 artists sit in the house’s front rooms drawing or painting two nude male models — one is toned and slender with floppy blonde hair and a cute moustache, while the other looks like he’s come directly out of a Tom illustration with his bulging muscles and hairy body.
“Other artists are the ones that have kept Tom alive,” Sharp muses. “They’ve acknowledged the influence he had.
Tom certainly gave permission to a lot of other artists to use explicit work in their fine art, which they have, and artists remember that.”
These regular drawing salons are a continuation of
Tom’s own artistic exploration.
“He had a really beautiful, kind of demure attitude with other artists. Tom was always inquiring about other mediums,” adds Durk, explaining how on Sunday afternoons Tom would invite a group of artists to the house and they would sit and talk about their techniques.
“Apart from the actual visual, one of the things that amazes me is the incredible artistry that went into his work,” Sharp says as he leads me inside TOM House and into the upstairs office where Tom’s boots, leathers and personal belongings are still on display as if the man himself was about to walk in any moment.
The art world didn’t accept Tom during most of his career. “I don’t think he gets the credit for being such a fine artist, because the snooty art world let the sex get in the way,” says Sharp. “They don’t look beyond the sexual depictions to actually look at the quality of the craftsmanship.”
It wasn’t until later in his life and career that Tom reflected on the impact his art had. In a recorded interview at California Institute of Arts ( available to view on YouTube), Tom acknowledges how he had come to realise that his work had influenced the way that gay men thought about themselves. “From the beginning he had intended to see if he could make that influence happen,” says Durk, “but he didn’t know if he would accomplish it. But now at this late age, he saw that he had contributed to it, that he had actually impacted the culture to that degree, he changed the way guys thought about themselves, how they held themselves.”
Through his art, Tom illustrated a world free of homophobia. Before the queer community had even begun to frame the complex issues around shame and how the context of a hetero- normative society continues to affect our ability to love, Tom’s work envisioned a place where lust and love between men was not just sexual and natural, but also intimate and joyful.
As early as 1961, Tom was also creating interracial drawings, and continued to do so throughout his career. “He didn’t grow up in an interracial environment. In fact, Finland was much less diverse than it is now. And yet he got this idea, so he just went forward with it and liked it, and just continued that,” says Durk.
His work was first printed in the US in 1957 by Physique Pictorial, a quarterly bodybuilding magazine that was popular with gay men since LGBTQ magazines were illegal at the time. ( It was the publication’s editor Bob Mizer that added the tag ‘ of Finland’ to Tom’s signature.) Those early drawings showed such innocent scenarios as men riding logs down the rivers of Finland, showing off with big smiles and happy- golucky expressions.
Sharp recalls how the beefcake magazines of the 1950s were a brand- new phenomenon and one of the few outlets where gay men could look at the bodies of other men. “The guys were just stuff we jerked off to. But even though they had to be clothed and they
“My drawings are primarily meant for guys who may have experienced misunderstanding and oppression and feel that they have somehow failed in their lives. I want to encourage them. I want to encourage this minority group, to tell them not to give up, to think positively about their act and whole being”
Tom of Finland
couldn’t have any physical contact, even with all these restrictions, Tom made his guys look at each other in a certain way. We knew when we looked at them, [ that] they were not just guys on the street, they were cruising each other. They couldn’t be explicit. But then when you look at the stuff that wasn’t published there were these huge giant orgies, with fire hydrant- sized dicks,” Sharp adds with a grin.
Durk notes how Tom’s published work of the 1950s depicted well- adjusted men that were very obviously homosexual. “The relationship between the men in the images was clearly bonded,” he says, before adding that gay men would spot the magazine and know immediately that it spoke to them. “Kids would either buy them or steal them, and they would covet them because they were an identity that they connected to. In so many ways, Tom was the father that so many gay boys didn’t have because their fathers didn’t know how to give them positive role models, and there was nothing in society.”
Tom’s images are firmly fixed in a masculinity that some critics have said emulate heterosexual role- modelling, but Durk is quick to address this as missing the point entirely. “He did lots of gay boys that were flamboyant and happy being flamboyant,” Durk says. “But he wanted the super masculine to be there and for it to be clear that they were homos. That was the thing that society was so unforgiving of us. And they were so unwilling to give us that because they didn’t want us to identify as being males. They wanted us to be this strange, womanish anomaly that was ill and perverted and if not criminal, mentally ill.”
In 1960s America, displays of male affection in drawings or in photographs were forbidden, with fighting one of the only ways that an image could depict a relationship between two men. “That in itself says a lot,” Durks reflects. “It tells how we were being controlled and how we were still able to actually thrive even though it was in a negative way.”
As society changed and frontal nudity became legal, it became easier to show sexual contact in magazines, and in European publications, in particular. Tom had to compete with the photography that was coming through, and how he did that was by enlarging the muscle and, most famously, the cocks. “Tom wasn’t trying to make them realistic,” says Durk,
“he was making them more fantastical and so that they became like gods.”
Tom told Durk that his best drawings were done when he was sexually aroused. “I thought, ‘ Well, that just keeps it within the realm of dirty pornography.’ But what he was really saying in his simple English was that when you’re sexually aroused, your vision, the way that you perceive things is so much more detailed. It’s like all of your senses are heightened when you’re sexually aroused. So your ability to actually execute something is much more superb.”
One of Durk’s ultimate Tom of Finland artworks is one of my favourites, too. It’s a piercing portrait of Durk that was drawn shortly after the pair met ( see page 49). The precision in the pencil work, the detail and emotion the image captures is extraordinary. “What amazed me about that particular drawing was that it was absolutely realistic. But what really took me back on it was that he captured my soul. Having known me, he was able to take my persona and my soul and embed it into this drawing and for it to be visible to the viewer.”
The illustration on the cover of this month’s edition of Attitude celebrating what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday holds a special place in Durk’s heart, being the first Tom of Finland artwork that he purchased for himself in 1978. “It really embodied the essence of what Tom’s work gave to me, with two men, interconnected, bonded together in a brotherhood of power and submission together. It was what I sought out to find for myself as a young adult homo in a relationship with another man. So it pleases me to see this work being presented on the front cover of your magazine. It is about attitude in a very defined manner.”
Art doesn’t need to be political to be powerful. But it’s impossible to separate the extreme radical nature of the work of Tom of Finland with the fact that its sexual utopia is still a dream away for LGBTQ communities around the world.
“He didn’t want to publicly proclaim himself as an activist, but in fact he was,” says Durk. “He was an artist that was an activist, which I think is in itself unique because most activists are verbal, political writers. But as a visual artist, he was an activist.”
When Tom passed away in 1991, Durk made it his mission to continue pushing his partner’s legacy. “When he was getting ready to depart, I said to him, ‘ What I promise you is that I will do my best to keep your artwork out in the popular culture.’ And if I can do that, it will do the rest itself.”
A hundred years since his birth and three decades after his death, Tom of Finland’s message of sexual freedom is as vital today as it was when he was alive.
His work continues to find new audiences, even beyond his gay fanbase. Durk shares a memory of how eight years ago at an exhibition in Riga, Latvia, three gay women were laughing and smiling at Tom’s work. When he asked them what was going through their heads, one replied, “He just makes us feel good inside.
“A year or two before that, at an exhibition in Paris, I asked a straight female photographer the same question,” says Durk. “She said to me, ‘ Here stands the works of a man who did not inhibit what was in his heart. He represents freedom for all of us’.”
Online exhibition Tom of Finland: 100 Years is at davidkordanskygallery. com until 12 May; tomoffinland. org
“A naked man is, of course beautiful, but dress him in black leather or a uniform — ah, then he is more than beautiful, then he
is sexy!”
Tom of Finland