Tom of Finland

 

Tom of Finland

 Iconic masculine images

Tom of Finland & Bob Mizer

A classic Tom of Finland

A new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA.  Wish I could go.

Tom of Finland is the creator of some of the most iconic and readily recognizable imagery of post-war gay culture. He produced thousands of images beginning in the 1940s, robbing straight homophobic culture of its most virile and masculine archetypes (bikers, hoodlums, lumberjacks, cops, cowboys, and sailors) and recasting them—through deft skill and fantastic imagination—as unapologetic, self-aware, and boastfully proud enthusiasts of gay sex. His most innovative achievement though, worked out in fastidious renderings of gear, props, settings, and power relations inherent therein, was to create the depictions that would eventually become the foundation of an emerging gay leather culture. Tom imagined the leather scene by drawing it; real men were inspired by it... and suited themselves up.

Bob Mizer began photographing as early as 1942, but unlike many of his contemporaries in the subculture of illicit physique nudes, Mizer took the Hollywood star-system approach and founded the Athletic Model Guild in 1945, a film and photo studio specializing in handsome natural-bodied (as opposed to exclusively muscle-bound, the norm of the day) boy-next-door talent. In his myriad satirical prison dramas, sci-fi flix, domesticated bachelor scenarios, and elegantly captivating studio sessions, Mizer photographed and filmed over 10,000 models at a rough estimate of 60 photos a day, seven days a week for almost 50 years. Mizer always presented a fresh-faced and free, unashamed and gregarious, totally natural and light-hearted approach to male nudity and intimate physical contact between men. For these groundbreaking perspectives in eroticized representation alone, Mizer ranks with Alfred Kinsey at the forefront of the sexual revolution.


Read more here.  [See another stunning Bob Mizer photo here]

Bob Mizer's photo of Dick Dubois, 1956 

Hypermasculine intimacy

Tom of Finland

Depictor of the archetypal hypermasculine gay. There's room for him as well as "vulnerable goslings" (to quote Ethan Mordden). Gay is a broad church, one might even say a "catholic" church. ("Catholic" comes from the Ancient Greek, kat-holos, which means across the whole, i.e., everywhere)  Uniforms, leather, muscles, tight military pants ... it's all there.  Some straights think we long for effeminate men, men who are substitutes (in their eyes) for women.  No:  we are much broader and more catholic than that.  We love men, from the hypermasculine through the ordinary bloke on to the femme (like Luigi in Majorca Flats).  Odd, isn't it, that we should be so catholic, no?

Tom of Finland

One of the strands of gay is hypermasculinity: big blokes in leather or uniform, with cropped hair and buff to the power 3 bodies.  Tom of Finland was the artist who made his and our  fantasies of those sorts of guy real, in fact who defined our images of the leather stud, the soldier, the sailor, the manly queer.   I confess to enjoying his drawings and cartoons, even though I know they are quite unrealistic, and that in fact this very hypermasculinity is probably a product of internalised homophobia  ("we're not homos -- look how manly we are!")  But at least the hypermasculine don't retreat into self pity.  They work out instead.  And buy leather.

I'll be posting a series of Tom of Finland's images.  I like this one especially.  Just look at the look in this guy's eyes!  I can't work out what he's thinking with any certainty, but I know that if a guy looked like that at me, I should be both apprehensive and incredibly turned on.