The work spans Laaksonen’s childhood growing up in Kaarina, Finland, as the son of schoolteachers to his 1957 entry into the American market via bodybuilding magazines, all the way to the straightforwardly pornographic work that he did up until his death from emphysema in 1991. “The Pleasure of Play” will include more than 180 drawings, often executed in graphite, and 600 photo collages. Of his subjects, Laaksonen said, “I began to exaggerate their maleness on purpose to point out that all gays don’t necessarily need to be just ‘those damn queers,’ that they could be as handsome, strong, and masculine as any other men.” Tom of Finland spent his career contradicting the prevailing narratives of neutered and effeminate gay life. Laaksonen’s work retains its radical function it challenges the current belief held by many gays that in order to secure equal rights, we must downplay the sex in our sexuality and present ourselves as well behaved and “normal” (whatever that means). This is out in the open and therefore still a valuable discussion today about sexuality that’s not about gay marriage.” “It’s not like party-and-play, hidden-hotel-rooms business. “I think the liberated smile that his characters have is still progressive,” says Stefan Kalmár, the curator of “Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play,” a comprehensive exhibit of Laaksonen’s work that opens in June at New York’s Artists Space (where Kalmár is also executive director). Tom’s men were out, they weren’t pathologized, and they were shameless in a time when it seemed impossible for most gay men to be that way. Years before gay liberation was conceivable and a half-century before society would see quantifiable proof of its fruits, Tom of Finland (birth name: Touko Laaksonen) was depicting hardcore, all-male sex, often set in public spaces, and he was doing it with a positive sensibility. But what continues to make Tom’s men so incredibly subversive is a quality far less salacious than those by which they are best known: their smiles.
Tom of Finland’s iconic drawings of idealized gay sexuality are, as a body of work, a buffet of fantastically rendered flesh. The dicks that could double as fire hoses.
The willowy waistlines and accomplished abs.