Month: May 2017

lgbt-history-archive:

“I work very hard to make sure that the men I draw having sex are proud men having happy sex!” – Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland.

Picture: Tuoko Laaksonen (May 8, 1920 – November 7, 1991) and his protégé Durk Dehner, The Eagle, San Francisco, California, 1985. Photo by Robert Cruzan.

In 1956, Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen, who was born ninety-seven years ago today, submitted drawings to “Physique Pictorial,” an influential American muscle magazine, under the pseudonym Tom; the magazine’s editor credited the drawings to Tom of Finland, and an iconic career began.

Over the next three and a half decades, Tom of Finland’s illustrations—which typically presented hypermasculine men in overtly homoerotic settings—stood in direct contrast to mainstream imagery of gay men as the archetypal “sissy.

Tom of Finland’s work, or at least the culture it inspired, continues to impact the gay community today. Dr. Susan Stryker, for example, argues that the rise of the Tom of Finland-inspired “clone look” in the mid-1970s “signaled the return of a more gender-normative expression of male homosexuality. At the cultural level, it is possible to trace the current ‘homonormativity’ of mainstream gay culture (an emphasis on being ‘straight-looking and straight-acting’), as well as the perceived lack of meaningful connection to transgender communities among mainstream gays and lesbians, to the shifts” in the mid-1970s. Stryker does not suggest, nor do we, that Tom of Finland himself had any intention other than to create his unique brand of homoerotic art, but his work nonetheless must be viewed in a larger context.

Touko Laaksonen died of an emphysema-induced stroke on November 7, 1991; he was seventy-one.  (at San Francisco, California)

leatherarchives:

Our countdown to International Mr. Leather continues with 1980

Having started late in the first year, there was a determination not to get off to a late start in 1980. “What if we…” conversations were all around, but the hardest thing was the realization that the first IML had been a smashing success. What do you do, Chuck and Dom asked each other, to top that? What do we do to improve on it? On top of such “gotta succeed” feelings, they had to deal with the fact that Patrick Batt, the Gold Coast manager in 1979 who had been the go-to man and the get-it-done guy, was no longer on the team. He had gotten into a disagreement with Chuck over an incident at the bar. The result for him was that he was free to attend IML without having to do anything. For IML, it meant rethinking, reinventing and finding new ways.  International Mr. Leather, Inc.