Deep Fag Imaginarium: Tom of Finland

Tom Of Finland seeded generations of gay men who built themselves in the image of characters. He imagined a world where gay men fucked and frolicked with joy, and where hierarchies of power were refigured as topographies of pleasure and play. VAULT looks back at the explosive art-pornography of Touko Valio Laaksonen.

written by Blake Lawrence May 2022

When I was a teenager, I used to draw men I wanted to fuck. I lived in a regional beach town, and I wouldn’t find any other queers until I could drive an hour or so to meet them – so I would draw them. My drawings would specifically approximate the Japanese surfers I’d see at Angourie Point: long hair, steamers rolled down, hard-edged tan lines, wet. My scribbles were muscular with immense genitals, inspired by the Gonad Man (Mark Sutherland) comics my parents bought me for Christmas one year. The eponymous character had preposterously large sex organs, wore a leather harness and got an erection when he surfed a perfect keg – I’d have an erection with him. Gonad Man is a racist and misogynistic comic, but its overt sexuality got my synapses firing. My drawings were terrible, but they were what I had to get off. Eventually my little sister’s discovery of one taped to the side of my closet would begin my journey out of it.

The world-altering gay eroticism of artist and pornographer Touko Valio Laaksonen, better known by his pseudonym Tom or Tommi, grew from a similar realm of private pleasure seeking, of a necessity to illustrate desires at a time when their consummation was not immediately available to him. I’m following porn studies theorist Leena-Maija Rossi in emphatically asserting “artist-pornographer,” deliberately troubling historic art-world delineations between ‘fine-art’ and porno. Touko’s drawings were led by his cock, by a physiology of arousal. If he wasn’t hard, ...Subscribe to read this article in full