Tom of Finland

Biography

In spring 1957 the cover of the American magazine Physique Pictorial carried a drawing: two log drivers at work and a third man watching them. The credit read “Tom”. The drawings had been sent to the editors from Finland by a man named Touko Laaksonen, and “Tom” was a shortening of his first name. A few months later the editor, Bob Mizer, devised the full credit, Tom of Finland. The artist himself did not want any reference to his home country, but the name had already been printed.

Laaksonen was born on 8 May 1920 in Kaarina, in south-western Finland, not far from Turku. His father, Edwin, and his mother, Suoma, were schoolteachers; the family lived in the school building and spent summers at their cottage in Kakskerta. There were a brother and sister, Kaija and Heli, and also older half-siblings, Pentti and Salme. By the age of five Touko played the piano and drew comics. After school in Turku he moved to Helsinki in 1939 to study advertising.

In February 1940 he was conscripted into the army. He served in anti-aircraft units and rose to lieutenant; he was awarded the Cross of Liberty for his service. He later said that his interest in men in uniform, especially German soldiers in Finland, grew out of those years. In interviews he insisted that there were no political statements in his drawings, that he hated Nazi philosophy and racism, and that he drew the uniforms because they were the most striking. These subjects make up a small part of his work, and recent anthologies usually leave them out.

After the war, in 1945, he returned to his studies and also studied at the Sibelius Institute. By day he did window displays and advertising posters; in the evening he played the piano in cafés and at parties. Since his youth he had also been drawing something else: men he would have liked to meet but did not dare approach. His early sheets are softer and more romantic than the later ones: middle-class men, without emphasised musculature or dramatic poses. Later they gave way to sailors, bikers, lumberjacks, labourers and men in leather.

In 1953 he met the dancer Veli Mäkinen, and they lived together for 28 years, until Veli’s death in 1981. At the end of 1956, at Veli’s urging, he sent drawings to Physique Pictorial. Magazines of this kind were published as physical-fitness titles: American rules forbade explicit scenes, and this shaped the manner of his work in the late 1950s. He drew more explicitly for private clients, and those sheets were not published. From 1958 he worked at the advertising agency McCann in Helsinki, as creative director. A drawing of a family for a Philips advertisement was rejected by the client: the father came out too sexy. Until 1971 homosexual relations in Finland were regarded as a mental disorder and were punishable, and Laaksonen did not tell his relatives about himself: Veli was introduced to the family as his flatmate. His sister Kaija knew of his orientation, but until his death she did not know that he was Tom of Finland.

In the 1960s, when American courts eased the restrictions on images of the nude male body, magazines with athletic photographs lost their market, and he began to draw more explicitly and to exaggerate his figures more strongly. In the late 1960s he invented Kake, a moustached hero in a leather jacket: 26 comics about him appeared between 1968 and 1986.

In 1973 the first exhibition took place in Hamburg. It was a success but brought no profit: all the drawings except one were stolen. In the same year Laaksonen left his full-time job at the agency and began to live on the income from his drawings. By the mid-1970s his manner had become almost photographic: he used photographs as a basis, often taken by himself, but did not copy them, instead exaggerating the jaw, the muscles and other features. The next exhibition took place only in 1978, in Los Angeles. He made new acquaintances, among them the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and the Canadian businessman Durk Dehner. In 1979 Laaksonen and Dehner founded the Tom of Finland Company to protect the copyright in his widely pirated drawings.

In 1984 they founded the Tom of Finland Foundation to collect, preserve and exhibit erotic art. By his own account, this was what he was proudest of. In the 1980s he travelled to America more and more often, and in his last years spent six months a year in Los Angeles, where he made about eight hundred works, roughly a fifth of his entire output. In 1989 his work was shown at the New Museum in New York; in 1990 the first exhibition in Finland took place at the Muu gallery in Helsinki, and the Finnish Comics Society awarded him its Puupäähattu prize. Because of tremors in his hands he switched from pencil to pastel. He died on 7 November 1991 in Helsinki. The documentary film “Daddy and the Muscle Academy”, directed by Ilppo Pohjola, was released the same year and in 1992 won a Jussi Award.