Tom Of Finland -2017- (ORIGINAL)

The undisputed cornerstone of the 2017 celebration was the landmark exhibition, Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play , which opened at Artists Space in New York before traveling to MOCA Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. This was not a small, niche gallery show for fetishists. This was a major institutional survey, curated by the esteemed art historian Richard D. Meyer.

This official state endorsement was staggering. For decades, Finland had a complicated relationship with its most famous erotic artist. Laaksonen, a former army officer, had to send his work abroad to be published, as Finland’s anti-gay laws remained on the books until 1971. To see his art on a postage stamp—a symbol of national pride and civic order—represented a complete reclamation. Finland was no longer apologizing for Tom; it was claiming him as a national treasure, a cultural export on par with Alvar Aalto and Jean Sibelius. The stamp release turned Tom of Finland into a household name in his homeland, a status he never achieved in life. tom of finland -2017-

In response, 2017’s discourse around Tom of Finland matured. Scholars and activists pointed out that Tom’s masculinity was a camp performance—so exaggerated as to be absurd. The leather cop in a Tom drawing is not an agent of state repression; he is a sexual fantasy who exists only for the pleasure of other men. Furthermore, Tom’s work was inherently democratic. He drew men of all ages and body types (though always muscular), and his influence directly fueled the leather and BDSM subcultures that pioneered safe-sex practices during the AIDS crisis. The 2017 centennial argued that Tom’s world was not a precursor to Andrew Tate-style misogyny, but a queer utopia where masculinity was a costume to be put on and taken off at will. The undisputed cornerstone of the 2017 celebration was

The most surreal—and telling—event of 2017 occurred not in the art districts of West Hollywood, but at the post offices of Helsinki. On September 8, 2017, Posti , the Finnish postal service, issued three Tom of Finland stamps. The designs featured a self-portrait of Laaksonen and two of his iconic leather-clad characters. The reaction was a perfect microcosm of the culture wars of the late 2010s. Conservative politicians in Finland fumed, claiming the state was endorsing pornography. Yet the public response was overwhelmingly positive, with the stamps selling out in record time. Laaksonen, a former army officer, had to send

The exhibition’s genius lay in its refusal to apologize. Previous attempts to show Tom’s work often framed it as a sociological curiosity—a symptom of pre-Stonewall oppression or post-AIDS anxiety. The Pleasure of Play did the radical opposite: it argued for Laaksonen as a formal master of line and shade. It placed his drawings of uniformed policemen, bikers, and loggers directly in dialogue with the classical traditions he admired: the idealized physiques of Greek vases, the heroic sculptures of Auguste Rodin, and the muscular realism of George Quaintance.

2017 also saw the release of the feature film Tom of Finland , directed by Dome Karukoski. While the film had premiered at festivals in late 2016, its wide international release in 2017 solidified the centennial narrative. Crucially, the biopic did not focus on the fantastical men of his drawings, but on the quiet, traumatized man who created them.

The 2017 revival did not occur in a vacuum. It coincided with the rise of the #MeToo movement and an intense cultural debate about masculinity, power, and consent. Critics on the left occasionally questioned Tom’s aesthetic: was his celebration of the “male animal” simply a replication of toxic, patriarchal power structures? Were his depictions of uniformed authority figures (cops, soldiers) politically problematic in an era of police brutality and militarism?