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See Dick Run:
The Pornographer and the Culture Brokers
The route Tom of Finland's work has traveled over the four decadesduring which he was active as a draftsman is somewhat surprising.From the physique magazines of the fifties and early exhibitions in sexshops, it moved on to the temples of high culture, ending up in theearly nineties on the Whitney Museum's walls, at Christie's auctions,and as the subject of reviews in glossy art magazines. This chapter startsout with a brief biographical sketch, moves on to track the itinerary ofTom's work, and concludes by looking at some of the dangers that lurkin high art's darker corners.
Touko's Early Years
Touko Laaksonen, who would become Tom of Finland, was born toteacher parents on May 8, 1920, in the northern-European country ofFinland, a densely forested and ardently Evangelical Lutheran landthat had gained independence from Russia three years earlier. Hisfamily included two older sisters, a brother, and a younger sister. TheLaaksonens lived peacefully at the village school of Kaarina, nearTurku, of which the village has today become a suburb: "I grew up ina strong family with one brother, three sisters, and lots of cousins alwaysaround. We lived outside a small town in western Finland, so myfirst fantasies were of farmboys and bus drivers who passed on theroad. Those guys were different from my schoolteacher father, who alwayspushed his musical interests on me and wanted me to play theorgan. One of the boy's earliest passionswas drawing cartoon stories;at age eight he had started a lifelong infatuation with this format. Beforelong, his sexuality awoke and found its way into his pictures: "Imade my first sexual drawings when I was ten years old, before I reallyeven knew how to do them. I mean, I knew how people fuck, but nothow two guys fuck, so I couldn't show the action, just tough figures.One day, my younger sister found the drawings in my bureau drawerand got all excited by them, but she didn't understand them." His interestin art did not diminish during his high school years, and aftergraduating in 1939 he pursued a degree in commercial drawing atHelsinki's Art Academy, where he got his first taste of freedom: "Iwasn't interested in sitting in church and playing an organ, so I lefthome at nineteen to study advertising art in Helsinki. Then came thewar—five years of it—and the Nazis."
Touko was drafted in April 1940, which put a temporary halt to hiserotic output, and spent most of the war guarding the rather quiet skiesover suburban Helsinki. Finland, besieged by the USSR, had been aGerman ally since 1941, but not until the summer of 1944 did LieutenantLaaksonen come face-to-face with Soviet troops on the easternfront in the Karelia region.
After the war, Touko participated in a state-sponsored exhibition ofart produced by soldiers, contributing some two dozen portraits (whichhave been missing ever since). He returned to the Art Academy,studying graphic design, and in 1946 he took piano lessons atHelsinki's Sibelius Academy. From 1948 on he worked as a freelancedesigner in publicity, doing magazine layouts and window displays, aliving he supplemented in the early fifties by playing the piano atHelsinki's Palace Hotel. Touko was by now well-known on Helsinki'sunderground gay scene, but was—as were most homosexuals in thosedays—very discreet about his sexual preference outside gay circles. Atthat time homosexuality was illegal (and would continue to be until1971) and a social taboo in Finland.
The Fifties and Sixties: Beefcake and Beyond
In 1951, in his early thirties, Laaksonen started traveling around Europeand over the following years discovered the budding leatherscenes of Berlin, Hamburg (where he bought his first porn in 1952),and London. In these cities he was noticed because of the portfolio ofdrawings that he always carried with him. His trips did not always gosmoothly: "In the early '50s, I was living in Berlin, and I was, well, Iwas pretty wild. I wouldn't listen to what anybody said and the upshotwas that I had everything stolen from me. Even my passport. Severalhundred drawings as well. Then, five years ago, I was in Belgium, andthis man asked me if I would like to see several of my old drawings.What does he show me? Nine of the works that were stolen 30 yearsbefore and two countries away!" After returning to Helsinki in 1953,he met the man of his life while on one of his cruising bouts. A dancer,Veli (Finnish for "brother"; his surname is not in the public domain)would become his only longtime companion, their relationship lastinguntil Veli's death from throat cancer in 1981: "I had actually only onerelationship that I would call ... a love relationship. I had short-termaffairs with a couple of guys before that, but then I met one young guywho was twelve years younger than I was.... I met him in 1953 in apark, I was coming home from somewhere and I felt now I had to havesome contact with somebody, have a couple drinks or so. So I met thisguy on the street, and he was just—he was not hustling—but he waslike a hustler, and so I started talking to him and asked him if hewanted to have a drink, and so he was very willing to do that. And sohe stayed at my place that night, and we didn't make any plans for thefuture, but next night when I came home again he was there waiting ...so that's when it started, and that's when we moved to myplace and we started living together. But it wasn't easy. We had problemsin the beginning very much, and then came the time that the sexwasn't any more the most important thing but it was deeper inside, butit was on a mental level, different, and the harmony was built there, ina way. I think that still, at least to me, there was more love in that thanin the sex we'd had before. The feeling, this love, a real love, a great relationshipwas grown from there all those years through."
Touko's newfound love did not distract him from his artistic pursuits.In 1957 he first saw drawings of his published, in the U.S. (based on theWest Coast) beefcake mag Physique Pictorial. Although the magazinemainly published photographs of half-naked young men, it also featureda number of graphic artists, all blessed with catchy pseudonyms such asSpartacus, Etienne of Chicago, and—my personal favorite—Art-Bob.Tom would come to overshadow all of these contemporaries. Over thenext twenty years, Tom of Finland (this nom de plume was an inventionof Bob Mizer, Physique Pictorial's publisher) would contribute someone hundred images to its pages (and often its covers)? The collaborationbetween Laaksonen and Mizer would also result in the commercializationof sets of prints of Tom drawings and the publication of aforty-eight-page album entitled Best of Tom. U.K. periodicals such as Scanand Royal Photography (the latter catering to fans of corporal punishment)also took Tom's work, and from 1959 he could count on a steadyinternational stream of commissions (although he never seems to havemade much money from these endeavors). Tom now produced bothexplicitly sexual drawings for private clients and toned-down work forpublication in physique magazines. In the early sixties, he branched outto produce straightforward illustrations for "gay books" such as Sons ofthe Fathers and All the Sad Young Men, long-forgotten titles put out by aChristopher Street-based outfit called Village Press.
Not until 1965, however, did a drawing with full frontal nudityappear, in the Philadelphia-based magazine Drum, in defiance of thegeneral ban on pornography in the United States (which would successfullybe challenged a few years later). Around that time the lawsregulating pornography had been relaxed throughout Scandinavia,and Tom's published work became increasingly explicit? From 1967,Tom began producing his hard-core Kake comic books for publishersDFT (Denmark) and Revolt Press (Sweden). Leatherman Kake, whohad made his first appearances in Tom's work in the late forties, wouldbecome Tom's longest-lasting and most-developed superhero; Tomwould produce twenty-six albums with the sideburned hunk as thecentral character. The U.S. physique magazines Tom worked for, oftenreluctantly, also started publishing his "natural" pictures after theSupreme Court declared pornography permissible in the late sixties. Asthe gay press boomed (and the era of physique photography drew to aclose), many of Tom's drawings found their way in to U.S. pirate editions,perpetuating Tom's inability to reap the full financial rewards ofhis output.
The Seventies: Building a Career
The gay subculture was changing radically in the early seventies, andone of its manifestations was a rapidly expanding porn market on bothsides of the Atlantic. This new situation led Tom to give up his dayjob as the head of the Art Department at the Finnish branch of theMcCann-Erickson advertising agency, where he had worked since1957: "I left my job there in 1973 because it was cheaper to live as afree-lancer, without having to dress perfectly every day, go to cocktailparties, and have a car and a summer house. Since then I've lived injeans, and I've lived on my drawing." Tom could, by now, count sufficientlyon orders from magazines and private clients to live. Onemajor center for his activities at the time was Hamburg, a city he hadbeen visiting since the early fifties. A trendsetting gay bar there commissioneda large mural, and in October a sex shop owned by RevoltPress in that city became the venue for Tom's first ever exhibition.The original plates for Tom's cartoon story about Pekka, a lumberjack,which Revolt had published in 1973, were put on show there. After theexhibition, the shop owner told Tom all but one of the plates had beenstolen, but in the late nineties it turned out that he had in fact sold them.
No more exhibitions occurred until 1978, when four were organized,all of them in small gay galleries or shops. These settings impliedlittle, if any, contact with a wider audience: Tom had expanded his distributionnetwork from mail order and skin mags to a more directforum for selling his work, but that was as far as things went until1978. Still, his work was slowly getting noticed in wider circles, as is attestedby its inclusion in Margaret Walters's The Male Nude: A New Perspective(Paddington Press, 1978), a nongay anthology. The author ofthis respectable tome did not think much of Tom's work, but its inclusionis nonetheless a sign of its increasing perceived importance. Nineteenseventy-eight was a crucial year for Tom's career. In the earlyspring, he made his first visit to the United States to attend the openingof an exhibition of the original plates of a calendar he had produced fora Los Angeles gallery. The show traveled on to San Francisco, whereTom met the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who turned out tobe a fan of Tom's work, and the two became friends. In the autumn,New York City followed suit with a show of Tom and his American colleagueEtienne at a Greenwich Village boot shop and gallery calledStompers, where Tom again saw Robert Mapplethorpe. Andy Warholalso showed up for the opening, although his diaries make no mentionof this outing. In early 1980, the Robert Samuel Gallery—a dedicatedart space located on Broadway in the heart of New York's alternativeart scene—held a more high-profile exhibition of Tom's work. Theshow prompted Soho Weekly News critic Robert Pierce to write an articlein which he traced the importance of work such as Tom of Finland's.He unhesitatingly extended the qualification "art" to Tom's drawings:
Last Sunday a show of Tom's work opened at the well-appointed Robert Samuel Gallery, a gallery accepted as respectable and legitimate by the New York art establishment. Three hours after the show opened, three-quarters of the art—bearing prices of $1,000 to $3,000—had been sold out. The work that has earned Tom of Finland his reputation fits the dictionary definition of pornography: he draws his own sexual fantasies and the intent is arousal, of himself and of others. Nonetheless, the work is not merely pornography. The reasons are varied and complex. The man is a master with the pencil. Whether or not the New York culture brokers are going to be able to get past the content of male sensuality and homoerotic content to proclaim Tom a capable artist is irrelevant. He does figurative drawings in an acceptable art medium. The work reveals the artist and confronts emotional and psychological truth. This is art: pornographic art, maybe, but art.
Pierce saw the changing social position of gay men, who now hadtheir own enclaves in major American cities such as San Francisco andNew York and who were developing a new, distinct lifestyle and its accompanyingsubcultural products with growing assertiveness, as one ofthe reasons why such work could be exhibited outside the dimly litworld of the sex shop: "I see the much maligned Christopher Streetclone look—work boors, Levi's, plaid shirts, leather jackets—as a kindof realization of Tom's fantasy world. Gay men, through the symbolicpower of clothing, are asserting their image of themselves as men.Tom's fantasy is being realized on Christopher Street and this is one ofthe reasons that it's possible to show his work at Robert Samuel."Pierce noted a shift in the appreciation of gay erotica, one in which therepression and prosecution of previous decades was displaced by growingrecognition, and he also warned about the possibly lethal consequencesthose developments might have for this form of subculturalexpression, concluding his review with an expression of great ambivalence:
As recently at 1962—and perhaps more recently—gay men were routinely arrested by the New York police for owning gay pornographic art. A significant portion of the Stompers show was lent by Robert Milne, who, in 1955, was entrapped by police detectives and arrested for showing pornography.... He didn't show the detectives anything that could be legally identified as pornography, so they ransacked his bedroom until they found material that could be so classified. Milne was not convicted because this material was never presented in court. After the trial, he and his lawyer met the detectives at a pre-designated location and Milne bought back his own pornographic art. He also bought a packet of "dirty pictures" thoughtfully provided by the detectives. Two weeks later they appeared at his home with more dirty pictures to sell, but he'd already left the state. Other collectors and pornographic artists have similar horror stories to relate. Yet the artists continued to create—an act of defiance and a covert assertion of self in a period when overt action could mean blackmail or prison and, in some extreme cases, mental institutions.... If we had lived in a society that had accepted us and the idea of gay art, the pornographic artists of the last 30 years might not have existed. I wonder if gay pornographic art isn't really just gay art, driven underground. If it is, then its discovery by the Robert Samuel Gallery is going to compromise it, rob it of its soul. But then, of course, the fact that a respectable gallery has the freedom to present it means that the reasons for its creation are beginning to disappear. I don't know whether to mourn or rejoice.
Tom himself was quite excited by his new celebrity status as the gayscene's senior artist, and he expressed a keen interest in having hiswork exhibited in an unapologetic fashion: "I know my little `dirtydrawings' are never going to hang in the main salons of the Louvre,but it would be nice if ... our world learns to accept all the differentways of loving. Then maybe I could have a place in one of the smallerside rooms."
Tom's need to put his activities on more solid commercial footingrapidly became more urgent as his success grew. Tom was not much ofa businessman, but Durk Dehner, whom Tom had met in Los Angelesthe previous year, would help. In the spring of 1979, their first joint actwas to turn the remaining copies of the by-now-worthless 1978 calendars(which had not sold very well because of the L.A. gallery's poormarketing efforts) into portfolios of thirteen drawings, which were advertisedin the gay press as "Duos." They promptly sold out. Encouraged,the two men set up the Tom of Finland Company in Los Angeles,Durk's home base. Still operational today, the company has over theyears commercialized Tom's drawings and cartoon albums and has developedand distributed a wide range of spin-off material such asvideos, accessories, and calendars.
The Eighties: Going Overground
By the start of the eighties, a decisive shift in the public interest in thekind of work produced by Tom of Finland and some of his contemporarieswas occurring. Until that time, such work had resolutely beenrelegated to the margins of society and rejected by the art world, for instance,as "mere" pornography—in other words, commercial and withoutcultural value. A number of phenomena lay at the basis of thereevaluation of erotica and of a growing interest in such work withinthe cultural establishment. Crucially, the social position of gay menhad significantly changed. In the early seventies, encouraged by thesexual revolution and second-wave feminism, gay men created militantorganizations that promoted the liberation of gay (and other) sexualityand identity. Although this gay movement was composed ofnumerous divergent—and indeed often antithetical—currents, oneoutcome was a social debate on homosexuality in which gay men—andlesbians—assertively took the lead. This led to the emergence ofgreater space for manifestations of gayness and higher visibility formany of its more sexual manifestations, which had hitherto been relegatedto obscurity. For many, being gay became not a problem, butsomething to be proud of.
In addition to this greater social tolerance—and partly because ofit—better and different networks were created between men whoidentified as gay, which led to a more intense debate within this community,and which allowed for strategic alliances that also contributedto a strengthening of gay men's social position. At first, interest in gayerotica was limited to these gay subcultures, which now had their ownautonomous spaces in which images of importance to this group couldbe displayed. These subcultures were based on sexuality, sexual identity,and generated a whole stratum of institutions, from bars and discosto services (launderettes, medical practices, and so on) and culturalinstitutions. Such subcultures do have an impact on the dominant culturein which they operate and against which they agitate, especiallywhen led by a group of assertive young professionals, as was the casewith most gay subcultures in the late seventies and early eighties. Thisgroup rejected the idea that gay men would be less masculine thantheir straight counterparts. One visible example of this train of thoughtwas macho fashion, or the clone look. In this context, Tom of Finland'swork was perceived as emancipatory, as it is totally devoted to a worldof supermen. Growing mobility and the dominance of North Americanculture contributed significantly to the swift distribution of these phenomenathroughout the Western world. In the early eighties, Tom'swork would be shown in a number of underground galleries in meccasof gay subculture such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco,New York, and Paris. Every other gay magazine was eager topublish Tom's glossy artwork.
The gay subculture's growing impact was also pointed up by mainstreammedia interest in its cultural manifestations. When Amsterdamgay institution Rob, a shop specializing in leather and SM accoutrements(to which a gallery devoted to gay erotica art was attached),hosted a Tom of Finland exhibition, a journalist, Carolijn Visser, fromthe NRC Handelsblad showed up at the opening? In her article she describedthe event's atmosphere:
(Continues...)
Excerpted from DIRTY PICTURES by MICHA RAMAKERS. Copyright © 2000 by Micha Ramakers. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
| Introduction | ix |
| 1. See Dick Run: The Pornographer and the Culture Brokers | 1 |
| 2. The Dark Mirror of Art? | 24 |
| 3. Being Sexed Is Hard Work | 55 |
| 4. Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick | 99 |
| 5. The Emperor's Old Clothes? | 121 |
| 6. I Love a Man in a Uniform (I Need an Order) | 148 |
| 7. The Streets Are the Battleground | 180 |
| 8. Beat Me Up, Scottie! | 213 |
| Chronology of Exhibitions | 239 |
| Notes | 243 |
| Bibliography | 257 |
| Illustration Credits | 262 |
| Index | 263 |
Overview