The Filter^: Tom of Finland

In 1939, as the Soviet Union invaded Finland, no one could have imagined how this event would fundamentally contribute to the portrayal of the gay man across Europe and America for the rest of the twentieth century. Yet this moment in history, or rather Finland’s subsequent deal made with Nazi Germany in Operation Barbarossa, was to have such an impact on the developing mind of a young commercial illustrator in Helsinki, that it should surely appear (at least as a footnote) in any history of homosexuality written about the last 100 years.

“All my early sexual experiences were with German soldiers,” the artist Touko Laaksonen was to say in 1991, “no one made a uniform like the Germans.” These words obviously carry an awkward resonance, not least for Laaksonen himself; and though it may seem at first a somewhat flippant argument, a reductive view of the true horrors of Nazi atrocities across Europe, what Laaksonen states there is a firebrand moment, something that was to massively shape the way in which we view gay men today.

We should start with a little about Laaksonen and why he matters to you, whatever your sexuality, whether you have heard of him or not.

No matter how you look at it, Touko Laaksonen is not a household name. Yet the importance of this Finnish illustrator can not be underestimated: “if one had to list the dozen or so most influential gay male visual artists of the last three decades,” Thomas Waugh wrote in Out/Lines, his 2002 history of gay graphical art, “one would have to include him among the likes of General Idea, Gilbert and George, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Pierre and Gilles, Andy Warhol and Bruce Weber.” And yet, as I’ve already suggested, it is quite possible that you have not heard of Laaksonen at all. This is partly because for the main part of his career, Laaksonen published his pictures under the rather grand nom de plume, ‘Tom of Finland’, and in certain houses, that is a household name. Yet whilst we have almost certainly heard of Hockney, no matter what our sexuality is, it is the nature of Laaksonen’s art that means he has not reached widespread appeal.

Laaksonen, to put it bluntly, is Finland’s most famous pornographer. His illustrations – mostly monochrome, linear drawings (though early and later work makes use of pastel to a greater extent) – depict men of astonishing physical proportions engaged in extremely graphic sexual acts. It is probably fair to say that whereas with Hockney one might seek out his art on purely aesthetic grounds, with Laaksonen, there is usually a need to be drawn to the subject-matter of his work before you know of his existence. Whilst Hockney might creep a swimming pool scene into the quiet clip-frames of ‘cultured’ heterosexual suburbia – a curled up sausage-dog, even perhaps a daring, innocent male nude hanging on the bathroom wall – it is probably fair to say that there are disappointingly few heterosexual people with a Laaksonen print hanging above their fireplaces. One might even wish to argue that what I am writing about here is not even ‘art’ at all. Yet this distinction between Hockney and Laaksonen, to which we might apply those bulky, broadly useless terms: “high” and “low” art, does perhaps explain something of why Laaksonen has had so much influence.

His work was produced at a time before the decriminalization both of hardcore pornography and homosexuality (it was to remain illegal in Finland until 1971, classed as a mental illness until 1981, and illegal to ‘promote’ homosexuality until 1999). Laaksonen’s pictures first appeared in the American ‘physique’ magazines of the 1950s. Between the photographs of oiled bodybuilders in semi-modest posing pouches, (in order – you must understand – to present what might be achieved from lifting weights and wholesome living), these magazines printed suggestive illustrations of ‘all-male’ men. Parallels can be drawn between this work and the genre of heterosexual ‘Cheesecake’ art or GGA in America of the same period. They are outwardly ‘innocent’ images, merely representations of the male, muscular physique; yet they tread that curious line between the everyday innocence demanded by censorship and the total depravity that might occur should a woman’s step onto a bus be cut short by a sudden gust of wind beneath her skirts. The art of both plays upon the idea that sex is always lurking beneath the surface of daily life; the most mundane occupation is always waiting to be subverted into sexually charged possibility. It is the denial that censorship creates that makes this art powerful. The forbidden representation often becomes the subject for the work itself, playing with situations where sex should be inappropriate for the very reason that censorship demands that all sex in art is inappropriate.

Beneath the surface publication of Laaksonen’s drawings of muscular lumberjacks submitted to Physique Pictorial, he was also producing hardcore underground storybooks. It is these that must be considered to have had the greatest impact on gay culture. For years before the decriminalization of homosexuality, pornography such as this was one of few representations of gay life available – certainly one of few that presented the homosexual man in a positive light. Of course, Laaksonen was not the only artist of this nature at work during this period, but by 1960 he had become the main illustrator for Physique Pictorial, and in part because he was the most visible of the underground artists, it is his art that has best endured.

Though heavily based in fantasy, for many years it was only this underground pornography that offered a real sense of what it was to be gay. The main function of the storybooks is clearly to titillate, but because of this peculiar position, it should not be underestimated quite what a formative role these images were to have on the attitudes of the men who read them. Films, art, novels – a role that all art plays which is perhaps not always immediately acknowledged, is the means it has to develop the personalities of its consumers. In 1959 a man might watch Cary Grant at his local picturehouse and acquire from his performance the mannerisms of a suave and stylish lover. He might do so on a conscious level; practicing at home before the mirror the deft ease of removing a matchbook from his pocket, or he might merely repeat a line from the film without thinking one evening at a dance. He might simply begin to carry himself in the same way that his film idol does. This kind of emulation occurs all of the time, and of course we might turn to Cary Grant no matter what our sexuality. It is no doubt a survival instinct – we seek to acquire the skills of others around us that we perceive to be useful to us. As a gay man in 1960s America then, the sources for emulation specific to your sexuality might be restricted to underground pornography. To state the case far too simply: Tom of Finland taught a generation of homosexual men how to be gay.

Urgh. There… I’ve said it. Of course that’s not true. It’s far more complicated than that, but as a crass oversimplification it might convey something of the influence that this single man had on the ‘gay aesthetic’ of the twentieth century. His contribution was fundamental, both in the way that gay men saw themselves, and in how heterosexual people saw them. One does not have to be aware of Laaksonen to have been influenced by him. Without his artwork so many cultural stereotypes that you do know would not now exist. I would argue that if it were not for Laaksonen, we would not have had The Village People; cartoons in the Daily Mail would not use the moustachioed, leather-hatted figure as a shorthand with which to peddle homophobia; so many jokes, so much comedy would probably not exist; but most importantly if it were not for Laaksonen it would no doubt be a far less life-affirming experience to be open about your sexuality in the modern world.

And in turn, a lot of this might be traced back to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Finland in 1939. We need at this juncture to be open and frank about what we mean by fetishism. To put things plainly, I would say that what I mean in this instance is the extension, or redirection, of sexual desire into inanimate objects (or facets) not necessarily directly connected with sex. For Laaksonen, his fetish was uniforms; in particular it was leather boots. It does not take a great deal of enquiry or cod-psychology to understand why this might have been the case. Laaksonen was the son of school teachers; respectable middle-class figures. He grew up in a society where expression of his sexual desires could result in two years imprisonment and as a result there is a certain level of repression through his formative years. The positive images of masculinity – the thing that he was naturally drawn to – came in the form of the woodsmen and labourers that he saw growing up, who he began drawing at the age of ten. These men could not have been more different from the figures of either himself or his father, and the thing that united them was the footwear of their labour. Aged ten, he begged his parents to buy him a pair of these boots, the connection already made between these objects and the men who he admired. He secretly wore the boots to bed until one night he was caught by his mother. Only a country like Finland could have produced this man; it was the stark dichotomy between his respectable home life and the proximity to the wildness of the forester that no doubt so shaped his image of the world. He was both close to these men who worked near his home, and yet in terms of who he was, could not be further removed for them.

The arrival of German troops in Finland was to crystallize his attraction to leather boots and also result in his fetishisation of uniforms. In 1939, aged 19 Laaksonen was living away from home for the first time, studying art in Helsinki. The arrival of these new men coincided with his first homosexual encounters. We might notice in ourselves certain recurring facets in the people we are attracted to that develop from our first sexual experiences. Teenage crushes might continue to be pursued in developing forms throughout our adult life. For Laaksonen, the first men he was to have sex with were all in Nazi uniform.

There is understandably much unease about this fact amongst admirers of Laaksonen’s work. Many of his early works feature men in Nazi uniform and in later life he was at pains to distance himself from these images, of which very few still survive. Yet the danger is that we try to deny the influence that the Nazi uniform had upon his aesthetic sense. The German presence in Finland in the 1940s must to an extent have seemed to be a salvation from the Soviet Union, though by no means an easy alliance. Germany acted as the country’s rescuer and this is undeniably a theme that runs through much of Laaksonen’s stories. Yet the moral dimension of Nazism is not what his art fetishises at all; it is merely the material culture of it. Obviously the two cannot be wholly seperated, and so it is understandable that he adapted his reference points to be directed at a more general image of the uniform. Despite this, almost all of his imagery may be traced back to the same genesis; the peaked caps, the highly polished black leather belts, the epaulettes and jodhpurs worn by so many of his characters, might all be considered to be merely adaptations of the uniform of the Wehrmacht.

The form in which this aesthetic most confidently settled was in the character of Kake who appeared in a series of twenty-six storybooks from 1968 onwards. Kake, “a sort of Johnny Appleseed” figure as Dian Hanson describes him in the introduction to the Taschen collection of Laaksonen’s work, developed various aspects of the uniform fetish in the form of a leather biker. The look that was styled perhaps most obviously on Marlon Brando in the film The Wild One, was an already existing image that had been adopted by many demobbed servicemen after the second world war. It resounds with various aspects of military style, and yet ventures also a freedom, a dangerous lawlessness that was found outside of army life. Though other artists occasionally toyed with this image, it was Laaksonen who most resolutely claimed the leather biker as a gay icon, finding that it chimed with the rebellion of expressing homosexuality as well as offering a homocentric cultural group.

Kake’s first appearance in a story titled ‘The Intruder’ is an interesting example of this lawlessness. The opening frame depicts Kake dressed all in leather, spying on a young man changing in his bedroom. In the next scene once the man is in bed masturbating beneath the covers to a heterosexual porn magazine, Kake breaks into the room through the open window. The following frames depict Kake subjecting the somewhat reluctant straight man to a series of sexual acts, which only finally he begins to enjoy. Our hero here is presumably the eponymous Kake, and clearly the morality of what is essentially a rape is a rather dark one. The straight man is apparently ‘liberated’ from his mistaken ways with the magazine (now conspicuously discarded on the bedroom floor) and finally returns Kake’s passionate kiss affirming his repressed homosexual desire. Yet the act is not without consequence; the man’s father enters the room surprising the couple four scenes from the end; Kake attempts to flee, but halfway out of the window the father closes the window on him with his legs still inside the room. In the final scene the father proceeds to sodomise the trapped intruder, in front of his delighted, masturbating son.

On its basest level it conveys the same message of almost all of Laaksonen’s stories, his fantasy that deep-down all men are homosexual, even that most taboo of possibilities, a man’s father; at the same time it stands as a near-direct parallel for Finland’s invasion by the Soviet Union and its subsequent rescue by the ‘Fatherland’; but most importantly it depicts a savage political satire on the repression of homosexual men. ‘The Intruder’ appeared the year before the Stonewall riots, and the image of Kake is firmly based in that spirit of rebellion, redressing the image of the homosexual as the underdog. Laaksonen’s early work depicts much more effeminate figures, but Kake’s strength is his sexuality. In part, ‘The Intruder’ satirises the corruption of those who wished to repress gay men; we might be uneasy with Kake’s forced advances on the son, but the father’s response is an equal act (added to which is the implication of incest which serves to undermine the received image of the family unit as a secure moral foundation), but the story does not seek to rest blame on any party. Actually what all of Laaksonen’s stories promote is the sense of equality, everyone ends up enjoying the sex in his pictures and no figure ultimately dominates. In the 1984 storybook ‘Postal Rape’ we find a jack-booted and jodhpured Kake now clearly much older and sporting a moustache – a look very like that of Freddie Mercury whose image owed a great debt to Laaksonen’s drawings. It is also a rather sweet aspect of the Kake stories that the character ages alongside his original readers. In ‘Postal Rape’ Kake punishes his postman for creasing a piece of mail. There is a joke, of course, on the envelope’s legend: DO NOT BEND, and the story develops as a series of consequences to this one erring act. Yet the outcome is that retaliation only breeds further reprisals, and that as such, sex is not about the dominance of one person over another, as such roles break down until everyone is doing something to someone else.

There are clear precedents in this kind of storytelling in the sexual comedies of the eighteenth century, in the novels of Fielding, Cleland and Defoe; but whereas those works served to portray a certain liberation in the role of women, Laaksonen’s storybooks defined the emerging image of the newly-legal gay man. There are many chickens and many eggs in all of this; how much did this underground pornography serve to represent the already existing promiscuous gay and leather subculture, and how much did it act in the invention of it?

What is clear however, is that Laaksonen’s art is an important representation of gay men that contributed to the changing attitudes to homosexuality in the twentieth century. Even amongst other underground pornography from the 1950s and 60s there is a tendency to present the homosexual as somehow less-than-male. The aesthetic conventions served to feminise the gay man, often presenting him as a ‘fairy’ or a ‘queen’. Laaksonen responded by focusing on the facets that defined masculinity, exaggerating them, and elevating the figure of the gay man to heroic proportions. The message of this, to the many men who furtively turned to his artwork, was that homosexuality was not a deficiency but something that could be hypermasculine, something even enviable.

Since his death in 1991 his work has been represented by the Tom of Finland Foundation, which seeks to promote the cultural merits of erotic art and healthier, more tolerant attitudes about sexuality.

8 Comments

I had never heard of Laaksonen, so this is fascinating. I can see exactly how his imagery can prove enlightening and useful in acknowledging and exploring one's own sexuality, whatever it is. But I'm rather suprised to learn that homosexuiality was seen as a disorder as late as 1981 and not to be discussed positively until after 1999. There are a few paradoxes like this in Finland's 'socio-culture', which is fundamentally one built on equality, though in which there are a few corners that equality hasn't quite reached...

Posted by: Andrew Mellor | January 03, 2008 at 10:56 AM

Finland's repeal of the 'promotion of homosexuality' (which to be frank is such a ridiculous concept) is actually more progressive than the UK which only got rid of it in 2003 (2000 in Scotland). Finnish legislation since 2000 really seems to have set out to redress the imbalance that has existed throughout the twentieth century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_in_Finland

Posted by: JRWB | January 03, 2008 at 11:35 AM

ok im a teenage girl, and i was caught by my mom. its even weirder because i use my moms portable shoulder massager to do it! just as i orgasmed, she walked in, and i scrambled to cover up but she saw and knew what i was doing... she was all like "what are u doing" and i was like "yes, i do THAT" and shes like "i dont wanna know" and she walked out!! but the thing is that she is very proper, and hates anything from kissing to sex. she calls (but only when shes drunk) my 17 yr old sister a whore for not being a virgin..... PLEASE HELP?!? WHAT SHOULD I DO?!?!?

Posted by: generic viagra | May 18, 2010 at 12:14 AM

Thanks for the in depth discussion, but I think that the gay subculture was already existing, but it was hidden and obscure, what Laaksonen work did was to popularize and preserve this subcultural images for the generations to come. Many gay men looked like his characters but did not see his work, like me, then when I saw his work I can see that he really did represented the gay men subculture. His work did not invented these images that gay men saw as the ideal masculine look that separated them from the non man loving heterosexual men, but had always preserved this subcultures' heritage and and ideals, he will always be a gay icon.

Posted by: gayguy | August 18, 2010 at 09:14 AM