Tom of Finland: The Complete Kake Comics

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At first he kept these drawings hidden, but then destroyed them "at least by the time I went to serve the army. In gay magazines, Laaksonen's drawings were often cropped to be less explicit, as in this 1968 edition of Physique Pictorial. Laaksonen was able to publish his more overtly homoerotic work and it changed the context with "new possibilities and conventions for displaying frontal male nudity in magazines and movies.

Tom of Finland - 100 Years - Viewing Room - David Kordansky Tom of Finland - 100 Years - Viewing Room - David Kordansky

His favorite subjects were the rough manly men of his native Finland, as Touko knew from an early age that men interested him more than women. Throughout his body of work, Tom gave legendary form to an imaginative universe that helped fuel real-world liberation movements and enabled gay men to have agency over their sexuality in new ways. The country became embroiled in the Winter War with the USSR, and then became formally involved in World War II, and he was conscripted in February 1940 into the Finnish Army. Valentine Hooven III notes that when the series focuses on subjects such as BDSM or rape fetishism, any sadistic acts performed by Kake are rendered as "innocent fun," and that the characters Kake performs these acts on are "welcome to do the same to him.

The fashion line balances the original homoeroticism of the drawings with mainstream fashion culture, and their runway shows occur in many of the venues during the same times as other fashion companies. In 1976, Tom had his first art exhibition in Hamburg, but unfortunately, thieves took all the drawings.

Tom of Finland | Artnet | Page 2 Tom of Finland | Artnet | Page 2

In the early 1960s, the pioneering, boundary-pushing gay artist Robert Mapplethorpe, according to Patti Smith, discovered Tom of Finland’s work in a used bookstall in Times Square.It has since been confirmed that this action was not taken by Instagram(3) and the account has been reinstated (although it is still unclear who was behind the action). In his spare time he also started drawing erotic images for his own pleasure, [3] based on images of male laborers he had seen from an early age. When dialogue is included, such as an occasional exclamatory line or as incidental writing (signs, graffiti, etc. When we curated the Nordic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, we installed a whole wall with Tom of Finland drawings. He later attributed his fetishistic interest in uniformed men to encounters with men in army uniform, especially soldiers of the German Wehrmacht serving in Finland at that time.