My information about gay men thus far had come to me in the offhand manner in which most controversial topics are delivered to New York City kids, but Tom's world had nothing to do with soft-spoken and impeccably dressed men drinking sherry in my parents' apartment. In his world, men with wide torsos, flaring lats, and tiny asses gleefully penetrated each other in the public sphere: in parks, in public bathrooms (or "tearooms"), in sailor-filled bars. Their beauty was all but generic, and often every man in a single orgy would share the same features, the same expression.
And here's the other thing: They're dirty. Dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty. Tom's men have cocks as large as their well-developed forearms, and they practically pulsate right off the page--sometimes barely contained by leather chaps, or hot pants, or a tiny little posing pouch, but usually given free rein and heading right for the nearest available ass or mouth. Every occasion is an opportunity for sex, usually consensual, but not always.
This was roughly the time that Bruce Weber's series of Calvin Klein ads graced fashion magazines and billboards all over the city. I had realized with something akin to sadness--but not quite sadness--that although the men in these photographs were certainly gorgeous, this was a world of beautiful boys for other beautiful boys, despite the basic heterosexual premise of the ads. So by the time I encountered Tom of Finland, I had some sense of a world that had no place for me. I saw Tom's men the way I saw the illustrations in books of fairy tales, or pornography, for that matter--remote, unlikely, based in fantasy.
Not to mention the rare occurrence of women in Tom's world. One, for example, involves a woman who ventures into the woods with two other men, ostensibly to engage in a threesome. The two men go at it, ignoring the woman, and when she fetches a police officer to complain, he happily joins in, leaving her to play with his nightstick (which she does). Tom's women (there are three examples, as far as I know) are improbably built, with pneumatic breasts that start up at their necks, and bodies that are clearly masculine, like Michelangelo's female sculptures, essentially men with a set of beefy tits attached approximately where tits belong. Of course, Michelangelo didn't have access to nude female models and Tom did; Tom just chose to ignore them. "I can't draw women," he said in an interview with a Dutch newspaper. "They always turn out butch and masculine. I have given up trying and will never attempt to do it again."
Now, of course, it is quite acceptable in the literate set to adore pornography, as long as you are fashionably deconstructing it, à la Laura Kipnis' Bound and Gagged. Much of the ongoing discussion about Tom of Finland's work revolves around whether it's pornography or art, an argument that grows increasingly irrelevant as the spectrum of visual arts opens to include previously marginalized genres. It's more interesting to think about what happens to marginalized genres when they emerge above ground.
As a teenager, I didn't realize that Tom's happy homos were not so much a reflection of the time as an inspiration for it. He started drawing in the '40s (and continued until his death in 1991), bringing to light the underground activities that he found so pleasurable but that were largely still illegal. Part of the titillation arises from the transgressive (naughty!) nature of the acts he depicts. This is art that cannibalizes itself as it becomes more widely known: Once it loses its shock, it becomes kitsch--adored by some, written off by others, more of a period piece for the vintage shop than a relic for a museum. For me, Tom of Finland will always mean Greenwich Village in 1981.
Emily Hall is a heterosexual.
