Tom of Finland: The Body as Fantasy and Politics

The Finnish Context

Laaksonen was born in Kaarina, Finland in 1920. He was gay in a country where homosexuality would remain illegal until 1971 and was understood, by the culture at large, as somewhere between sin and sickness. He served in the Finnish Army during the Second World War — the uniform entered his imagery, never left it — and returned to civilian life in Helsinki, where he worked in advertising and drew, in private, the men he desired.

He drew them large. He drew them as he wished them: physically enormous, sexually confident, entirely free from the shame that Finnish society required of anyone in his position. The drawings were fantasy in the most literal sense — not escape from the world, but the world corrected, rebuilt according to a different set of values.

He sent twelve drawings to the American physique magazine Physique Pictorial in 1956. The editor, Bob Mizer, published them under the byline "Tom of Finland." The response was immediate. He had found his audience, and his audience had found him.

The Visual Language

The Tom of Finland figure is immediately recognisable: hyper-muscular, with a waist that no actual human possesses, wearing leather or uniform or nothing, in some state of desire or action or both. The faces are handsome, broadly rendered, expressing joy or lust or both. Nothing in the frame suggests shame.

This was radical. The available images of gay men in the 1950s and 1960s were almost entirely images of shame: legal records, medical case studies, the furtive and the pathological. Tom of Finland drew men who were not furtive, not pathological, not apologetic. Men who desired each other in public, in daylight, with the confidence of people who assumed they had every right.

The political content of that image — its insistence on gay male dignity and sexual freedom — was not incidental to its popularity. It was the point. Gay men who found these drawings did not just find them arousing. They found them, many of them reported, genuinely liberating. Here was an image of what they might be, if the world were different. The image helped make the world different.

The Craft

It is easy to discuss Tom of Finland in purely political terms and forget that the work is also, by any serious measure, technically accomplished. Laaksonen was a trained commercial artist. His draughtsmanship is precise. The musculature in his figures is anatomically studied, however hyperbolically rendered. The compositions — often complex, with multiple figures in dynamic relationship — are carefully organised.

He was not a fine artist in the institutional sense. His work appeared in physique magazines, in self-published booklets, eventually in gallery shows and museum collections. The medium was always slightly outside official culture. But the skill inside the medium was real, and critics who engaged with it seriously — as opposed to simply classifying it as pornography and moving on — consistently noted the care.

He made approximately 3,500 drawings over a fifty-year career. They cover a wider range of fantasy scenarios than the popular image suggests: not just leather bars and forest encounters, but domestic scenes, workplaces, the full geography of a gay male fantasy life. They are a sustained, carefully maintained world.

The Cultural Legacy

The influence of Tom of Finland on gay visual culture is so total that it is almost invisible — it has been absorbed into the language, so you no longer notice it when you encounter it. The aesthetic of gay leather culture, the visual vocabulary of gay masculine identity, the icons that appear on T-shirts and coffee cups and the walls of bars from Helsinki to Los Angeles: all of it traces back to Laaksonen's pencil.

He influenced fashion (Gianni Versace's leather and chain aesthetic is unthinkable without him), art (Jeff Koons has acknowledged the influence), and the entire genre of gay erotic illustration that followed him. The Tom of Finland Foundation, established in Los Angeles during his lifetime, continues to promote his work and support queer artists globally.

He died in Helsinki in 1991. Finland, the country that had once made him a criminal by the fact of his desires, issued a postage stamp in his honour in 2014.

Why He Matters for BoysDo

BoysDo is a photography platform, and Laaksonen was an illustrator. He belongs on this list anyway, because no account of gay male visual culture — no attempt to understand where the eye that appreciates this platform comes from — is complete without him.

He established, fifty years before the internet made it structurally possible, that there was an audience of gay men who wanted to look at images of gay men made with aesthetic intention and without apology. He found that audience with no distribution infrastructure, no algorithm, no social network. He found them because the need was real and the images were good.

That audience still exists. This platform is one of the places they come now.