Running from spring into that summer, the exhibition was a seismic cultural event. For sixty years, Tom’s work had lived in barber shops, bathhouses, and private collections. Now, his original drawings hung in the pristine white cube of a major institution, steps away from works by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
It was a year of contradictions. We celebrated his liberation while mourning the loss of his underground edge. We adored his masculine power while questioning its limitations. We watched a generation embrace his aesthetic while forgetting the blood, sweat, and police raids that made it necessary. tom of finland -2017-
In a way, this was the final realization of Tom’s fantasy. He always dreamed of a world where men could love men openly, publicly, and joyously. In 2017, that world was not real—the news was too dark for that. But for a few minutes a day, as a teenager scrolled through a re-drawn Tom of Finland man fighting a dragon or holding hands with a boyfriend, the fantasy lived. Looking back, 2017 was the year Tom of Finland stopped being a secret. It was the year the man who drew dirty pictures to survive the purges of the 1950s became a museum artifact, a movie hero, and a corporate logo. Running from spring into that summer, the exhibition
The 2017 retrospective forced a question that echoed through the art world: Is a drawing of a penis inherently obscene, or is it a portrait of resilience? If the MOCA exhibition was the intellectual proof of Tom’s arrival, the theatrical release of the Finnish biopic Tom of Finland (directed by Dome Karukoski) in 2017 was the emotional proof. It was a year of contradictions
The film was a masterclass in timing. Released in a year dominated by debates over toxic masculinity (the #MeToo movement was erupting in October 2017), the biopic presented a quiet, almost shy man who created an army of hyper-masculine saviors. The film’s central irony was not lost on 2017 audiences: The real Touko Laaksonen was a gentle, chain-smoking introvert who loved Frank Sinatra and his partner, Veli. He was not a leather-clad dominator; he was an artist who lived with his mother until she died.
Curators in 2017 argued passionately that Tom was not a pornographer, but a . They pointed to a key detail: Tom of Finland drew his first hyper-masculine men in 1956—a time when homosexuals were legally classified as criminals and mentally ill. His art was a direct act of warfare against that definition. He took the straight, conservative ideal of the American G.I. and the Finnish lumberjack and said, “He’s ours. He’s gay.”