In conversation with .. 5!

As Tom of Finland himself has once noted,
during his whole life, he did nothing
but interpret his dreams of ultimate
masculinity, and draw them. Combining
his love of machismo with his natural
artistic talent, he created a groundbreaking
body of work that celebrates
the idealized male form.
A grandmaster of homoerotic art of the
twentieth century and beyond whose
images of masculine gay men helped
smash stereotypes and produce new
diversity, not only did Tom of Finland
create new role models for gay men, but
he also had an impact on global culture,
style and attitude towards liberated
sexual expression.
By day a senior art director at an advertising
agency McCann Erickson, Touko
Valio Laaksonen aka Tom of Finland
spent his spare time drawing his sexual
fantasies that featured homoerotic archetypes
such as lumberjacks, sailors,
bikers, blue-collar workers, policemen
and men dressed in leather. Growing
up in Kaarina in rural Finland, he began
drawing cartoons of rough and masculine
labourers at an early age. His fantasies
were fueled by his experiences
in World War II, in which his country
fought on the side of the Nazis. Although
he despised the ideology, he became
deeply drawn to uniformed men of
authority. His eroticism subversively
reclaimed this style and reaffirmed
his position as part of the gay culture,
and from his earliest pieces onwards,
his subjects were ecstatic, gushing and
ejaculating.
As a way to avoid homophobic censorship
law in Finland in the 1950s, he
started submitting drawings as “Tom”
to the Bob Mizer’s publication Physique
Pictorial from Los Angeles. Soon, the
Tom of Finland legend was born and his
global career as an iconic gay figure was
jumpstarted. Inspired by biker culture
that embodied rebelliousness and danger,
he created illustrations that capitalized
on the leather and denim outfits
which separated his subjects from
mainstream sexual cultures. His works
fuelled both the sexual fantasies and
the aesthetic of many gay men, and the
emerging gay leather scene inspired his
works further and made them evolve.
His increasingly erotic drawings of hyper-masculine
men were distributed
worldwide in dime stores, sex shops or
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