However, it’s important not to separate Tom of Finland’s drawings from the historical context in which he created them. “At the time when I became aware of my sexual orientation, before World War Two, all gay activity was forbidden by law in most countries,” Laaksonen writes in the preface to his 1988 book, Retrospective I. Laaksonen, born in 1920 and raised by schoolteacher parents in a small town in southwestern Finland, says the first gay men he encountered “felt ashamed and guilty, like [they were] belonging to a lower human category” as a result of the prejudice they faced. He also acknowledges that his creativity was a reaction to this shame, saying: “Even though I had to hide my own desires – or maybe because of it – I started drawing fantasies of free and happy gay men.”
Creating a new stereotype
What’s more, Laaksonen developed his distinctive aesthetic – a homoerotic fantasy world populated by gay men who epitomised physical fitness and male desirability – as a corrective response to the particular, reductive way in which gay men were portrayed at the time. 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. Bengry says that the ‘pansy’ homosexual was invariably portrayed as “effete” and “the butt of the joke”. Even when he was allowed to “get one over on everyone else”, he was inevitably held up as exemplifying a kind of “failed masculinity”. “Tom of Finland is clearly a reaction against that,” Bengry asserts. “He’s showing that homoerotic desire can be masculine, valid, fun and playful.”