GAYLETTER

GAYLETTER

IMAGES COURTESY OF DAVID KORDANSKY GALLERY

Tom of Finland at David Kordansky Gallery in LA

Tom of Finland's Early Work 1944–1972 on view until March 07, 2015.

Tom of Finland, born Tuoko Laaksonen in 1920, was the granddaddy of modern gay culture. His fetishes and fantasies, inked on paper and seen around the world, reconceptualized what it meant to be a gay man. A series of his drawings spanning 15 years are on view in the inaugural show of David Kordansky’s new space, and it’s interesting to see pornographic works made for bedrooms and underground gay bars in the clean white cube of a contemporary art gallery. How times have changed.

 

Tom’s wartime experiences furnished him with the visual vocabulary of hypermasculinity. The show’s earliest works, completed in 1944 when Tom was serving in the Finnish Army, depict military men wearing butt-hugging riding pants in explicit sexual trysts. They’re a testament to Tom’s bravery and openness in a severely homophobic time, when drawing gay sex privately could have landed him in prison. Other graphite drawings show sailors, cowboys, and motorcycle studs with ballooning muscles and impossibly large cocks. In many, the only “sexual” contact is passed off as lockerroom fun or friendly roughhousing, probably because the images were made for circulation and had to pass European censors. But the figures are beautifully detailed, each bronzed hunk glistening under imagined sunlight, further evidence of Tom’s expert draftsmanship. By 1972, Tom proudly defied censorship with Kake (pronounced Kah-keh), his leatherdaddy alter-ego, who appears in a comic strip storyboard called T.V. Repair, a centerpiece of the show. Kake lures a hunky TV repairman over by unplugging his set and, well…you can imagine what happens next.

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28 at GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28 GAYLETTER

 

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28 11.08.17 GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_4 GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_5 GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_6 at GAYLETTER

 

 

 

Tom’s characters created a new gay culture that queered the masculine codes of straight society and made it possible for men to feel like men while loving other men. His masculine archetypes liberated gay men from homophobia, giving them confidence in a world that stripped them of it. After Stonewall, city streets around the world were packed with Tom’s sailors, athletes, and leather daddies. A new culture had been born.

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_7 at GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_8 at GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_9_GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_10_GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_11_GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_12_GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_13_GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_14_GAYLETTER

 

Screen shot 2015-01-28_15_GAYLETTER

 

The show is on view at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles until March 07, 2015.