Tom of Finland: the man who drew the leather scene

Who Tom of Finland was

Tom of Finland was the pen name of Touko Valio Laaksonen, born on 8 May 1920 in Kaarina, near Turku, Finland, and died on 7 November 1991 in Helsinki. Over roughly fifty years he produced some 3,500 drawings of men: lumberjacks, sailors, bikers, policemen, leathermen, all impossibly muscular, all obviously enjoying each other. At a time when homosexuality was a crime in Finland and in most of the world, he drew gay men who were proud, strong and happy, and that image changed how a generation of men saw themselves.

From advertising to Physique Pictorial

Laaksonen studied advertising in Helsinki, served as an officer in the Finnish army during the Second World War, and afterwards worked in advertising while drawing his men in private. In 1956 he sent some drawings to the American magazine Physique Pictorial, one of the bodybuilding magazines that quietly served a gay readership. The editor, Bob Mizer, put a drawing on the cover of the spring 1957 issue and credited it to "Tom", adding "of Finland". The name stuck. His work sold through the mail for two decades before he could show it openly; he gave up his day job in 1973 to draw full time.

Kake and the leather look

His best-known character is Kake, the moustached leatherman in a peaked cap, leather jacket and tight jeans who starred in a series of wordless comic books from 1968 onwards. Kake tops, Kake bottoms, Kake takes on whole groups, and he always walks away grinning: the message was that sex between men, in any position, is manly. The look Tom gave his characters became the look of the leather scene itself: the Muir cap, the black leather jacket and chaps, the harness, boots, the moustache, the leather and uniform fetish, the bulge that was never hidden. Walk into any leather bar today and you are walking into a Tom of Finland drawing.

Recognition

In the 1970s and 1980s his work moved from mail-order booklets to galleries. In 1984 he and Durk Dehner founded the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, which preserves his work and supports erotic art to this day. Finland, which once could have prosecuted him, put his drawings on official postage stamps in 2014, and the feature film Tom of Finland (2017, directed by Dome Karukoski) told his life story. His drawings hang in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other major collections, and his influence runs through Robert Mapplethorpe's photography, the Village People, Freddie Mercury's leather years and every fetish brand that sells a harness.

Why he matters to the gear

Tom did not invent the harness, the cock ring or the jockstrap, but he drew them on men who wore them with pride, and that made them desirable. Much of what you find at GaySteel, from solid steel to fetish wear and BDSM gear, exists in a scene he helped shape. When you put on a harness, a pair of boots and a jockstrap and look in the mirror, you are looking at his idea of a man. His drawings were also an invitation to experiment, to push each other's limits and to enjoy it without shame; that attitude is the reason this shop exists.