{"id":16709,"date":"2021-06-23T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-23T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=16709"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:14:26","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:14:26","slug":"where-touko-ends-and-tom-begins-two-takes-on-tom-of-finland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/where-touko-ends-and-tom-begins-two-takes-on-tom-of-finland\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Touko Ends and Tom Begins: Two Takes on Tom of Finland"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Partway through William Friedkin\u2019s Cruising<\/em>, undercover cop Steve Burns, who\u2019s after a serial killer targeting gay S&M practitioners, shows up at the Mineshaft on \u201cPrecinct Nite\u201d and finds the place teeming with men attired in police uniforms, caps, and helmets. As he\u2019s not \u2013 oblivious to the dress code, he\u2019s wearing a standard leather jacket, T-shirt, and blue jeans \u2013 Steve is confronted by the management and asked to leave, but before he\u2019s shown the door he gets an eyeful of a room full of guys, some brandishing nightsticks and other cop paraphernalia, playacting at what he does for a living. For all intents and purposes, they could have also stepped out of the drawings of Touko Laaksonen, a.k.a. Tom of Finland, whose eventful life and homoerotic art are being highlighted in the Criterion Channel\u2019s \u201cLeather Bound\u201d<\/em><\/a> <\/em>Double Feature, one of the ways it\u2019s celebrating Pride Month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever name he goes by, Laaksonen has been well-known in gay circles for decades, so it was inevitable he would receive the biopic treatment. Thankfully, it fell to one of his countrymen, Dome Karukoski, to bring his story to the screen in 2017\u2019s Tom of Finland<\/em>. This was also the case a quarter of a century earlier when Ilppo Pohjola made the hour-long documentary Daddy and the Muscle Academy<\/em>, which aired on Finnish television just weeks before Laaksonen\u2019s death from emphysema on November 7, 1991. Neither one paints a complete picture by itself, but between them it\u2019s possible to get a sense of who he was and the impact he had on the gay community during his heyday, as well as what he continues to mean to it today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI wanted to make a universal type. A guy who is open to anything.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daddy<\/em> starts with examples of Laaksonen\u2019s instantly recognizable art style, followed by a tracking shot through a low-lit warehouse space where a number of \u201cTom\u2019s men\u201d are half-glimpsed cavorting in the shadows. Then it introduces the man himself \u2013 aged 70 at the time of filming \u2013 working at his desk and telling his story, which Pohjola breaks into bite-sized chunks with headings like \u201cTom\u2019s Name\u201d (which he didn\u2019t choose himself), \u201cTom\u2019s Women\u201d (Laaksonen makes no bones about the fact that he\u2019s unable to make them look sexy), and \u201cTom\u2019s Total Maleness.\u201d With its focus on his sense of aesthetics, in particular the blue-collar types that informed Laaksonen\u2019s idealized vision of masculinity, Daddy<\/em> spends little time on his personal life. That\u2019s where Karukoski\u2019s biopic (scripted by Aleksi Bardy) comes in, although neither film dwells on his youth, which makes sense since his most formative experiences came while serving in the Helsinki Coastal Artillery in World War II, in which Finland was on the side of the Axis Powers since they were both against the Russians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It was during the war that Laaksonen\u2019s fascination with military uniforms (Nazi ones, in particular) began. Along with the soldiers and officers who inspired him to draw them, he gravitated toward sailors, construction workers, policemen, bikers, cowboys, and other rough-and-tumble types. To his models (many of which were taken from photographs) he added a fantasy element by exaggerating certain parts of their anatomy, especially as his art \u2013 first seen in the States in the pages of Physique Pictorial<\/em> in the late \u201950s \u2013 started to be serialized. This was exemplified by the creation of the character Kake, the quintessential leather man whose frank sexual escapades were chronicled (without the aid of dialogue, so they could be understood by anyone anywhere in the world) in a series of comics published between 1968 and 1986, later collected by TASCHEN (in association with the Tom of Finland Foundation) in a single volume in 2008. That there was sufficient interest in Laaksonen\u2019s work for this to occur years after his death says much about its continued ability to speak to new generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019re asking for trouble with pictures like these.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Compared with Daddy and the Muscle Academy<\/em>\u2019s freeform approach to Laaksonen\u2019s life and legacy, Tom of Finland<\/em> is both more straightforward (apart from the framing device and a couple war flashbacks, its story unfolds in a linear fashion) and strangely vague about when many of its individual scenes take place. While Daddy<\/em> ends on Laaksonen\u2019s rapturous reception at the International Mr. Leather competition in 1983, Tom<\/em> uses the same event as bookends, opening backstage as he\u2019s waiting to be introduced (and feeling ambivalent about being in the spotlight) and circling back to it after he\u2019s had a moment to think about his entire life. Karukoski and Bardy also keep Laaksonen\u2019s fantasies to a minimum, restricting that aspect to a handful of scenes of Kake observing from the sidelines. Then again, they also have him creating the character more than a decade too early, but his line about what he needs to be inspired (\u201cI have to have a hard-on. Then I know it\u2019s good,\u201d he says, echoing Samuel Fuller\u2019s screenwriting dictum) is accurate enough since it comes straight out of the documentary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Tom<\/em>, the key people in Laaksonen\u2019s life were a gay officer he meets during the war, his conservative sister who never accepts his \u201cchoice,\u201d the cute boarder who becomes his longtime companion, and his American agent who helps him take control of his publishing. Of them, though, the only one that rates a mention in Daddy<\/em> is the last, Durk Dehmer, rechristened Doug in standard biopic fashion. As his host when he travels to the US, Doug is present when Laaksonen gets his first taste of how much freer life is there, exemplified by the scene set in a club full of leather men that could have been lifted straight out of Cruising<\/em> (which, in turn, had used some Tom of Finland art as set dressing). \u201cThese are your men,\u201d Doug tells him, and so they are. His acceptance of the responsibility for inspiring an entire subculture is the moment Touko makes peace with forever being Tom to them. \"\"\/<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLeather Bound\u201d<\/em><\/a> is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, as is <\/em>\u201cCruising,\u201d<\/em><\/a> which is featured in the <\/em>\u201cQueersighted: Breaking Taboos\u201d<\/em><\/a> series.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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