The pornographic trailblazer behind JW Anderson’s homoerotic new capsule

Photo by @pawelherman

The iconoclastic Tom of Finland built a kitsch gay wonderland where absolutely everything came in extra large

Swollen nipples, bountiful pecs, and weighty, jock-strapped bulges make up the distinct visual hallmarks of the iconoclastic artist Tom of Finland. Born in a rural Finnish village in 1920, Tom’s six decades of sexual mythology incubated gay culture as we know it – his images of burly lumberjacks, bikers, and police officers monumental in their depiction of gleeful, guilt-free, gay sex. Freddie Mercury, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Village People, and countless gay tribes owe their aesthetic to the artist – complete with tight white vests, military caps, and sticky leather chaps.

Tom, notoriously, could not draw without an erection, plumbing his own experiences of gay cruising – which is how he met his partner, Veli – as he spilt his fantasies of a homo wonderland onto the page. As saccharine as they were salacious, there is a familiar, almost kitsch quality to Tom’s eroticism, as if Enid Blyton had done a round of the dark rooms in Berghain. The humongous smiles of Tom’s protagonists, set against twee pastoral landscapes and cosy log cabins, are matched only by their pendulous appendages, which one critic, Camille Paglia, deftly described as “flaunted, mammoth phalli, thick and fibrous, like serpentine vines or trees, brimming with sap”.

TOM OF FINLAND Untitled (From Circus), 1975, Graphite on paper, 11.69” x 08.25”, © 1975 Tom of Finland Foundation

Although, for much of his career, Tom’s work was dismissed as cheap smut, it has, posthumously, been reclaimed within queer cannon for its rebellious social commentary. Yet Tom of Finland most likely sits somewhere between the two extremes – fizzing along the fault lines of porn and politics – as his playthings melt patriarchal hierarchies with brute seduction and loads of bumming. Now the focus of a second JW Anderson capsule, the label has taken one of Tom’s leather daddies and blown him to XXL proportions, his legs splayed across the body of t-shirts, hoodies, shirts, and shorts.

“As a gay man and a designer, Tom of Finland has always fascinated me,” Anderson says. “I collect all types of art, including his drawings. To be able to use them in a JW Anderson collection is so exciting. I am really proud of this year’s collection and love that we were able to expand it to include ready-to-wear.” The collection can be shopped online from 11th June and instore from 14th June. With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know to get your fill.

TOM’S FIRST CRUSH WAS A NEIGHBOURING FARM BOY

Tom’s first crush allegedly came at the age of five, a thickset farm hand named Urho, who would be incarnated countless times throughout Tom’s fertile depictions of manhood. At 19, he began correspondence courses at a school of marketing and advertising but was soon caught up in the Russo-Finnish war, and then WWII, during which Finland allied with Germany. Long after, in 1956, Tom was working as an advertising exec at McCann Erickson, when, at the suggestion of a friend, he first submitted his personal erotica to the American gay mag Physique Pictorial.

His illustrations found a natural home in the USA, not only because they were in step with the gay liberation movement, which was progressing much faster than in his home-country, but because there was something tangibly American about his work – all the sports, outdoors, and brotherly camaraderie. Where photographs of nude men came under strict censoring laws, Tom’s illustrations were able to be sent through the post – since they did not make claims on real life events. The artist didn’t go to the US until 1978, though, when he started staying in California.

HE WAS MASC4MASC 

Tom’s vision of hypermasculine men was almost pagan in its worship of wedge-like silhouettes, muscle, and chiselled facial features. His subjects, burgeoning from all angles, would fill stark white pages like greco-roman sculptures or emerge from wooded forests and rivers like impish deity. While this would be considered problematic within contemporary queer culture, Tom felt it important to demonstrate that machismo and gay sex could coalesce, countering the “pansy” stereotype that society associated with other queer men.

The artist’s work is noted for its more progressive stance on gay sex, however. Within Tom’s illustrations, tops and bottoms are presented fluidly without the loaded male-female, dominant-submissive dichotomy – bottoms are just as big and forceful as tops!

HE LOVED A MAN IN UNIFORM

Policemen, lumberjacks, soldiers, office workers, mounties, bikers – there was not a subset of the patriarchy which Tom did not haunt for his own pleasure. The artist started to depict the temporarily stationed soldiers he would meet whilst cruising. During the war, he became enamoured with the German army’s striking military uniforms, which became an enduring reference point – dressing his men in peaked caps, suspenders, and stomping leather jackboots.

This look dovetailed with the glamorisation of biker culture in the US, which was manned by sexually-ambivalent stars like Marlon Brando. And as gay porn and photography became more explicit throughout the 70s, Tom’s initial flirtation with leather (and BDSM) went into overdrive. In turn, the artist struck a symbiotic relationship with the gay leather crowd – in 1974, Toms Saloon, a leather bar, opened in Hamburg. Elsewhere, men would take his illustrations to a tailor, snap a photo in their new outfits, and send it back to Tom. It meant the illustrator was both inspiring and being inspired by the denizens of these nascent communities.

HIS ART ADVOCATED FOR AIDS AWARENESS

After the spread of AIDS, Tom experienced a huge burden of guilt. “He had given people the confidence to go out and explore their sexuality and he began to wonder if he was partly responsible for sending all those young men to their deaths,” Durk Dehner, a friend and founder of Tom of Finland Foundation, told The Guardian. Tom, as a result, would use his art as a tool to promote safe sex. In the mid-’80s he started to include condoms in his illustrations, which became deliberately utopian and optimistic, bursting with vitality, as if to balance the hundreds of thousands of men who were wasting away. Since then, the Foundation has lent Tom’s designs to various sexual health initiatives, with his mischievous men emblazoned on condom packets and advertisements for HIV prevention. Tom, himself, died of emphysema in 1991 aged 71.

COMPLETE ARTICLE BY DANIEL RODGERS

Published: 11th June 2021

Categorised in: News