Touko Laaksonen

He loved art, literature, and music. But he loved those outdoorsmen even more. At that same age, Touko began to spy on a neighbor, a muscular, stomping farm boy whose name, “Urho,” means “hero.” Urho was the first in a long line of heroes to hold Tom’s attention as he memorized every flex of their lean muscles and every humorous twist of their full lips. In 1939, Touko began correspondence courses at a school of marketing and advertising. He was inducted in the spring of 1940 and first served in an antiaircraft unit in Helsinki. His fascination expanded to include the sexy city types he found in that cosmopolitan port—construction workers, sailors, and policemen—but he never dared proposition them.

When Stalin attacked Finland and Tom was wearing a lieutenant’s uniform, he found nirvana in the blackouts of World War II. At last, in the pitch-black streets of the city, he began to have the sex he had dreamed of with the uniformed men he lusted after. After the war, Touko studied music at the famed Sibelius Academy. Peace put an end to blackout sex, and uniforms became rare again, so Touko returned to his teenage practice of locking himself in his room, stripping naked, and stroking himself with one hand while the other created on paper what he could seldom find on the streets. By day, he did freelance artwork—advertising, window displays, and fashion design. In the evenings, he played the piano at parties and cafés, becoming a popular member of Helsinki’s postwar bohemian set. He avoided the fledgling gay scene because the so-called “artistic” bars were dominated by the flamboyant effeminacy typical of the time. He traveled frequently, becoming very familiar with the gay cruising areas found in every major city. Still, in 1953, when he met Veli—the man with whom he would live for the next 28 years—it was on a street corner a few blocks from home.

The demand for what Tom always called his “dirty drawings” grew quickly, but neither erotic art nor homosexual art paid very well in the 1950s. He soon stopped playing the piano so that he could devote more time to drawing, but it would be 1973 before Tom of Finland was making enough money for Touko Laaksonen to quit his daytime job in advertising. Once he could devote his efforts full-time to erotic drawing, Tom combined photorealistic attention to detail with his wildest sexual fantasies to produce a body of work that, for sheer homoerotism, will probably never be surpassed.

1976 was the year of Tom’s first art exhibition, in Hamburg, Germany. The experience was so negative—all but one of the drawings were stolen—that it would be 1978 before he agreed to another exhibition, in Los Angeles, for which he made his first trip to America. Over the next couple of years, a series of exhibitions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, with trips to America for each one, turned the shy Helsinki artist into an international gay celebrity with friends including Etienne and Robert Mapplethorpe.

In 1981, Tom’s lover, Veli, died of throat cancer. At the same time, the AIDS epidemic began to hit hard the very cities and circles of friends he had so recently come to love in America. Still, throughout the 1980s, his trips to America continued to increase until Tom was spending six months in Los Angeles with Durk Dehner for every six he spent back in Helsinki. After he was diagnosed with emphysema in 1988, Tom was forced to curtail his beloved traveling but continued to draw. When the disease and the medication caused his hand to tremble too much for him to execute the finely detailed work for which he had become famous, Tom returned to a childhood favorite, pastel. He executed a richly colored series of nudes in that medium almost until his death from an emphysema-induced stroke on November 7, 1991.

In spite of his own affectionate term, Tom’s work must be considered more than just “dirty drawings” and deserves some of the credit for changing the gay world’s self-image. When Tom’s work was first published, homosexual men thought they had to imitate women and spent their lives hiding in the shadows. Thirty-five years later, gay men were much more likely to be hard-bodied sun lovers in boots and leather—masculinity personified. Tom’s influence in that direction was no accidental byproduct of his art. From the beginning, he consciously strove to instill in his work a positive, upbeat openness. When asked whether he was not a little embarrassed that all his art showed men having sex, he disagreed emphatically: “I work very hard to make sure that the men I draw having sex are proud men having happy sex!”

—F. Valentine Hooven III, author of “Tom of Finland: Life and Work of a Gay Hero”