This was in contrast to the then-prevailing stereotypes of gay man as an effeminate sissy, as seen in vaudeville and films going back to the first years of the industry. The post-World War II era saw the rise of the biker culture as rejecting "the reorganization and normalization of life after the war, with its conformist, settled lifestyle." Biker subculture was both marginal and oppositional and provided postwar gay men with a stylized masculinity that included rebelliousness and danger. Pulled from the Finnish mythology of lumberjacks representing strong masculinity, Laaksonen emphasized and privileged " homoerotic potentiality relocating it in a gay context", a strategy repeated throughout his career.
One of his pieces was featured on the Spring 1957 cover, depicting two log drivers at work with a third man watching them. In the Winter issue later that year, editor Bob Mizer coined the credit Tom of Finland. In 1956 Laaksonen submitted drawings to the influential American magazine Physique Pictorial, which premiered the images in the 1957 Spring issue under the pseudonym Tom, as it resembled his given name Touko. The caption notes that reproductions of the complete "natural (nude) Tom drawings" are for sale by mail order. In gay magazines, Laaksonen's drawings were often cropped to be less explicit, as in this 1968 edition of Physique Pictorial. Another key difference is the lack of dramatic compositions, self-assertive poses, muscular bodies and "detached exotic settings" that his later work embodied. The men featured were middle-class, as opposed to the sailors, bikers, lumberjacks, construction workers, and other members of stereotypically hypermasculine working class groups that feature in his later work. Laaksonen's artwork of this period compared to later works is considered more romantic and softer with "gentle-featured shapes and forms". The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course I drew them anyway-they had the sexiest uniforms!" After the war, in 1945, he returned to studies. I am thinking only about the picture itself.
"In my drawings I have no political statements to make, no ideology. 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.
He served as an anti-aircraft officer, holding the rank of second lieutenant. At first he kept these drawings hidden, but then destroyed them "at least by the time I went to serve the army." 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. In his spare time he also started drawing erotic images for his own pleasure, based on images of male laborers he had seen from an early age. He went to school in Turku and in 1939, at the age of 19, he moved to Helsinki to study advertising. The family lived in the school building's attached living quarters. Both of his parents Suoma and Edwin Laaksonen were schoolteachers at the grammar school that served Kaarina. Laaksonen was born on and raised by a middle-class family in Kaarina, a town in southwestern Finland, near the city of Turku. When using a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo check the safe search settings where you can exclude adult content sites from your search results Īsk your internet service provider if they offer additional filters īe responsible, know what your children are doing online. Use family filters of your operating systems and/or browsers Other steps you can take to protect your children are: More information about the RTA Label and compatible services can be found here. Parental tools that are compatible with the RTA label will block access to this site. We use the "Restricted To Adults" (RTA) website label to better enable parental filtering. Protect your children from adult content and block access to this site by using parental controls.
PARENTS, PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you are a parent, it is your responsibility to keep any age-restricted content from being displayed to your children or wards. Furthermore, you represent and warrant that you will not allow any minor access to this site or services. This website should only be accessed if you are at least 18 years old or of legal age to view such material in your local jurisdiction, whichever is greater.
You are about to enter a website that contains explicit material (pornography).