July, the time for families to take the car and the kids for a week or two somewhere, anywhere, though not too far away. If you knew them all – the universally Italian American, with a few odd nationalities, like Armenians, thrown in – you’d laugh. for the neighborhood kids to come to our house, or to go to the “Riggi’s” house. Those days that were not suitable for going around the corner to play outside usually signaled the a.o.k. Mom’s cleaning left lots of time to fill without parental supervision. But within minutes, out woudld come the bucket and mom would scrub the entire floor on her hands and knees. The kitchen floor was so spotless, one wouldn’t have any hesitation picking up some food item that had dropped and popping it in one’s mouth. I’m sure if it was the fashion to diagnose every behavior, as it is now, she would have been found to have OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder.
My own mother didn’t have much interest in minding the children. It was a time when fathers worked and almost all the mothers stayed home to cook and clean and mind the children. We lived at the top of a hill that was the steepest you’d ever seen, and going down, would have meant having to push one’s bike or body back up that hill with great effort. When we needed space to play, it was “around the block,” Morningside Lane, where bunches of kids came together to play kick ball or stick ball or just rode bikes up and down the same block. It was a place where property sizes were tiny – just enough for a house, a bit of perimeter and a small backyard. For others it might be a humorous memory. For some the experience haunts and scars. It’s a right of passage, one few of us forget. Tom of Finland’s images re-envisioned what was shameful and even illegal with a proud, confident, and overwhelmingly positive celebration of sexuality and identity.Lewellen, played by Dakota Fanning, asking her friend for a look at what’s beneath his pants in exchange for a kiss, in “Houndog.” Institutional exhibitions of his work have elevated what was once considered pornographic to the status of the artwork and contextualized Laaksonen’s oeuvre within the struggles of the gay liberation movement, the AIDS crisis and, queer body politics. Tom of Finland’s illustrations have been influential to sado-masochism and fetish culture as well as inspiring many iconic gay artists, like Robert Mapplethorpe, Bob Mizer, George Quaintance, and Etienne. A dedicated publication also collates the comics of Kake, Tom’s favorite and reoccurring character.
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A series of TASCHEN books also focuses on different fantasy types that appear in Tom’s work the military man, sailors, cops and criminals, and blue collar, regular guys. TASCHEN’s XXL monograph The Art of Pleasure, chronicles Laaksonen’s homoerotica in all its explicit and suggestive playfulness. For many, Tom of Finland images were the first depictions of homosexual desire and sex they had ever seen. Tom’s men were men, and there was only one thing on their minds. His images of butch and muscular men engaged in intimacy, often dressed in working class uniforms, subverted the stereotype of the effete and intellectual gay man. By the late 60s Tom’s dirty drawings became the standard for gay art and Tom’s Men a template for a new gay masculinity.
After honing his artistic talents with study in Helsinki, he found commercial success in the Finnish advertising industry but secretly he continued creating his increasingly erotic drawings of hyper-masculine men.Īs a way to avoid homophobic censorship law, he submitted drawings to the American magazine Physique Pictorial and soon the Tom of Finland legend was born. Touko Laaksonen, the boy who would become Tom of Finland (1920-1991), began drawing cartoons of the rough and manly men of his native Finland at an early age. Nobody seems to be in trouble, in fact everyone appears to be enjoying themselves. Two male police officers, biceps bursting out of their uniforms, have pulled over a handsome young biker clad in a revealing leather outfit.