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In addition to baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, The Outfield also takes a swing at golf, cricket, tennis, rugby, archery, the Olympics, soccer, and a host of other wholesome athletic endeavors. “His muscular soldiers, lumberjacks and leathermen bikers were a direct contrast to the emasculating stereotypes that existed in his lifetime and that still exist in some ways today,” Ahmad says.
Freddie Mercury is one of a number of artists to have been influenced by Tom of Finland’s aesthetic
Weller says Tom of Finland’s work is now being reimagined by a new generation of queer performers who “play with the tropes he created and then really turn them on their head to create work that is political, challenging and often sexy”.
Laaksonen first drew a man of colour in 1960, and as his career progressed, he included more interracial couples in his drawings – something which certainly made his art feel even more taboo at the time. “I don't think Physique Pictorial had much of a straight male audience,” says Bengry. Laaksonen had been drawing for his own pleasure since the 30s, but in 1956 he submitted one of his efforts to the American beefcake magazine Physique Pictorial and had it published – that was when editor Bob Mizer gave him the pseudonym ‘Tom of Finland’.
Though publications like Physique Pictorial were ostensibly presented as bodybuilding manuals celebrating the male form, many were essentially purveyors of gay erotica hiding in plain sight.
His popularity continued to grow during the last two decades of his life, and in 1979 he and Dehner formed the Tom of Finland Company to copyright earlier work which had been widely pirated. Some early Tom of Finland illustrations depicting soldiers in Nazi uniforms are also inherently problematic. His hyper-masculine aesthetic has influenced Freddie Mercury, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Village People, fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, and photographers Robert Mapplethorpe and Bruce Weber.
Art historian Dr James Hicks says Tom of Finland is sometimes overlooked in the mainstream art world because “his work is dangerous and is meant to be dangerous”.
Equally, Tom of Finland’s deification of a certain type of gay man – muscular and avowedly masculine – hasn’t necessarily endeared him to all corners of the LGBTQ community.
Creators:Dylan Edwards
Audience:adult, teen
Genre:fiction, humor, non-fiction, sports
Series Type:available in print, complete, free online, series, stand-alone
Tone:irreverent, silly
Art Style:black and white, full-color, realistic
Queer Representation:gay male, lesbian, queer female, queer male, trans female, trans male
Other Tags:intersex
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The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course I drew them anyway – they had the sexiest uniforms!”
The politics of beefcakes
But in another way, Tom of Finland’s unashamedly gay drawings were inherently political – namely, because they dared to present imagery that mainstream society wasn’t ready to accept.
Fans can even buy a Tom of Finland leather jockstrap, a development which would surely tickle the late illustrator. “These photographs are so tiny – small enough to fit into an airmail envelope because letter-sized mail was unlikely to be opened by postal authorities” who might censor them.
And without having to maintain the pretence necessary for Physique Pictorial, Laaksonen could make his mail-order drawings explicitly sexual rather than merely highly suggestive.
Even if Laaksonen’s drawings now seem to perpetuate the stereotype of gay men as inherently sexual and supremely body-conscious, they were once groundbreaking for this very reason.
“Pop culture representations of gay and queer men in the first half of the 20th Century are dominated by the image of the ‘pansy’,” says Dr Justin Bengry, who runs the Queer History course at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Weller also says he sees a rarely discussed drag element to his aesthetic, citing his instantly recognisable “lewks [looks], attitudes and costumes”. Ahmad says it’s hard not to be moved by these photographs today because it was so risky for them to be produced, distributed and even owned at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in many countries.
Laaksonen was more artist than businessman, and for many years he was poorly paid for his illustrations by both the niche titles who published them and fans who commissioned bespoke pieces.
Even when he was allowed to “get one over on everyone else”, he was inevitably held up as exemplifying a kind of “failed masculinity”.
The Tom of Finland Foundation has championed Laaksonen’s work so effectively that it’s now displayed at leading galleries including New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Bengry says that the ‘pansy’ homosexual was invariably portrayed as “effete” and “the butt of the joke”.