March – April 2016

Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen, 1920–1991) lived and worked in a house in a quiet Los Angeles neighborhood for the last ten years of his life. This amazing house is now devoted to the preservation of Tom’s homoerotic art, his life and his legacy. Moving from room to room, the images of TOM House and works by the man that lived and worked here, is the feature a stunning new coffee table book TOM House: Tom of Finland in Los Angeles, by Michael Reynolds, photographed by Martyn Thompson and published by Rizzoli.

GED sat down with Marc Ransdell-Bellenger, our cover model and a curator of the Tom of Finland Foundation’s collection, to speak about the book, an upcoming movie, and the life of a Leatherman.

Sometimes it seems like it. I describe the place as a train which doesn’t stop. But most of the time it’s more like – holy shit, how did this become my life? How lucky am I to live and work here. I recall the very first time I saw one of Tom’s drawings in my early teens living in small town Kentucky and suddenly I knew I wasn’t the only one. That original hangs in the room next to mine. I live a life some Leather men in some square, landlocked state would kill to experience for ten minutes. I don’t have sexual fantasies, I have sexual realities. The Leather gods I jacked off to on the Internet 20 years ago, as well as several former International Mr. Leathers, are among my friends and leather family. I am only a small cog in a machine where we are all dedicated to the Foundation and its mission. Durk Dehner, president and cofounder, has devoted his life to it and literally given up his home to the Foundation. Sharp, the vice president and curator, seems to work from 10am to 3am pretty much seven days a week. We also have a large volunteer corps, without which we could never get things done.

“Mainstream” to TOM’s Foundation means that everyone has the opportunity to say thank-you to this great liberator. “Mainstream” means we all have a hero. “Mainstream” means TOM is permanently embedded in culture. Hey, it’s our job.
-Marc Ransdell-Bellenger

Tom of Finland Foundation
More About the TOM HOUSE book

Read the complete article
by Michael Westman

Published: 19th March 2016

Categorised in: Friends of Tom