IN THE DARKROOM: EXPLORING TOM OF FINLAND'S ENDURING INFLUENCE

Musings Abroad | Molly Gosewich

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"Whenever I was depressed or disgusted, I would feel him, that spirit inside, urging me back to living, back to drawing, I believe there is a lot to the world that can’t be seen or touched, and if you turn away from that — especially if you are an artist — you are avoiding an important part of life, maybe the very heart of it.” - Tom of Finland

Tom of Finland aka Touko Laaksonen 
Collage credit to Worldcrunch. Photo source.

Museums, be it local or international, are considered the arbiters of culture, keepers of history, and especially systems of representation. As an extension of such, exhibitions have become increasingly important to engage with many existing intersections of identity and to, in good faith, seek to advance conversations surrounding LGBTQ2+ iconography and representation in particular.

Fotografiska

My first grasp with queerness in the field of Museum Studies was with persons, both historical and contemporary: theorists like Judith Butler and artists such as Keith Haring, Mickalene Thomas, Catherine Opie, and my personal favourite, bisexual painter Tamara de Lempicka (I have a tattoo inspired by her work). The ArQuives, which was established to aid in the recovery and preservation of Canadian LGBTQ2+ histories, has also been a key window into queer museological knowledge, agency, and identities.

However, an artist I’ve always found to be equal parts seductive and intriguing throughout my experience as a Master of Museum Studies student is Tom of Finland (born Touko Laaksonen, 1920-1991). Though fairly characterized as graphic, provocative, and pornographic through his tangible association with kink and eroticism, his work is a refreshing reprieve from the puritanical Western art often kept by mainstream museums. Highly stylized and recognizable by muscled bodies, bulging appendages, leather fetish gear, and uniforms inspired by blue-collar workers and military men, Tom of Finland occupies a distinct, subversive space in the queer visual culture canon.

As someone with both an academic and personal interest in portraiture, I was even more enthralled with The Darkroom, a current exhibition (located in New York City, from April 30-August 20, 2021) that serves as an intimate look into the prolific artistry of Tom of Finland, curated by Berndt Arell of Fotografiska in collaboration with the Tom of Finland Foundation. As Pride 2021 celebrations looked a little different this year, The Darkroom is a fascinating way to engage with Tom of Finland’s 100 year legacy of queer art and never-before-seen, boundary-pushing, sexually powerful, homoerotic photographic portraits that served as references for his drawings.

Oppressed by the persecution of queerness in his native Finland, Laaksonen clandestinely photographed his muses/models as references for his drawings. They were kept under the cover of darkness and would become highly-coveted works in underground gay subcultures and communities. With the increasing openness found in the West, he would spend time in Los Angeles, where both freedom and his art were able to flourish. There, he would draw inspiration from American bodybuilding and develop a burgeoning interest in depicting Black men (some of his later illustrations would feature Black men and interracial sex scenes). This inclusion is doubly interesting, if not slightly problematic: Laaksonen had the general tendency to depict cis, white men, and more and more academics have touched on the hypermasculinization/hypersexualization and presence of Black men in visual culture. Though, it can be noted that, to some, he had helped to increase the visibility of "black gay male subjectivity" towards the culmination of the 20th century, the end of his career, to which critics characterize this period as his most overtly political. With Tom of Finland, all men were created equal.

Untitled, 1989. From Tom of Finland Foundation

Untitled, 1984 (Val Martin); Untitled, 1986, Untitled, 1986 (above), Untitled, 1986 (below).

Tom of Finland Permanent Collection

A statement from exhibition producer Jessica Jarl says, “To Fotografiska, this is a brilliant example of how photography – besides standing on its own – often plays a part in many different kinds of creating. The story of The Darkroom – the first art exhibition where Tom of Finland's photographs are also being shown – is in many ways a journey through time. From dark hidden rooms or parks, to open, well-lit salons. In some places, strong forces are now pushing this art – and the lifestyles it reflects – back into the darkness. One more reason to lift the importance of free art. And it feels right to have Tom's voice be heard.”

The very premise of this exhibition is born out of the sexually repressive environment of 1950s Finland. Laaksonen set up a darkroom in a closet of his home in Helsinki to develop the photographs he took. Not only racy and homoerotic, they were outlawed. The Darkroom displays his portraits on black walls with red accents; they are the star of the show, featuring hyper-masculine hunks, clad in uniforms or leather gear, all distended muscles and members. They act to fearlessly confront a system that even today continues to deny freedoms, legality, and basic rights to queer, gay, and trans communities — bringing to light the current relevancy of their struggle for liberation. 

Tom of Finland: 'The Darkroom'
Wallpaper

Even during the height of the AIDS crisis, Laaksonen continued to create positive images of gay culture, and in 1987, made a now-famous drawing encouraging the practice of safe sex. The title of the exhibition The Darkroom just feels so apt. To end off, here is a quote by longtime Whitney Museum curator Richard D. Marshall (Quoted in Ferguson, 2019) that illustrates the impact and significance of not only Tom of Finland's work, but also of the very concept of The Darkroom:

“Tom of Finland emerged in the 1950s to deliver us from the repressive, fearful, and disguised sexuality of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tom made the idealized male beauty of the Greek gods become contemporary, real living gods, with no judgmental distinction between active and passive sexual roles. Tom made the artificial Roman breastplate into lively skin and muscle; Tom made Christian sado-masochism positive, desirable, and enviable; Tom made Michelangelo’s saints naked and aggressive; Tom brought honest, ribald, consensual, enjoyable, and delirious male sexuality back into twentieth century art. (1997, p. 252)”

Suffice to say, as travel restrictions begin to lessen, I recommend visiting this exhibition if you’re interested in studies and imagery of sex positivity, masculinity, countering heteronormativity, queer culture, and unapologetic art. If you find yourself in New York City, go see for yourself.

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Sources Referenced and Further Reading

Alan Sinfield (2004). On Sexuality and Power. Columbia University Press, https://doi.org/10.7312/sinf13408.

Leena-Maija Rossi (2019). From arousing drawings to art to behold: Tom of Finland’s long and winding road to the art world, Porn Studies, 6:4, 459-463, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2019.1580450

Michael Ferguson (2019) Tom of Finland, Journal of Homosexuality, 66:6, 857-862, DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2018.1514206

Nicholas Boston (2021). The Photography of Tom of Finland. Gay City News, https://www.gaycitynews.com/tom-of-finland-photography-art/.

Thomson Reuters Institute (2020). Out of the Shadows: Remembering ‘Tom of Finland,’

https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/legal/tom-of-finland/.

ACT, IDENTITY, AND AN ANCIENT GREEK VASE

Object of the Week | Caitlin McCurdy

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In all my articles for this column, I have shied away from talking about the Greeks and their plethora of erotic and nude artifacts that fill museum’s collections. I find their thousands years history rather daunting to tackle, and the complex homosocial, inter-generational sexual relationships between men that are equally well-documented even more so. But we’re opening that can of worms now, so let’s discuss this little pocket of history through this week’s object: an amphora from the British Museum’s collection, originally from Athens of Archaic Greece, circa 540 BCE.

Front side of an Archaic Greek Amphora (c) The Trustees of the British Museum | Source

Amphorai were typically used for the storage and transport of wine and food. To create black-figure pottery, a slip that turned black during firing was applied to the pottery in the shape of figures and ornamental motifs.

I first came across this artifact in a book called A Little Gay History by R.B. Parkinson. It’s a cute, quick look at same-sex desire across history, and an interesting read to see how this desire has manifested itself in material culture across time and civilizations. Parkinson discusses the culturally approved intimacy of boys & men in ancient Greece, how they were structured by age, and the inclusion of these relationships in scenes depicted on pottery.

Cover of R. B. Parkinson's Book. Courtesy of Caitlin McCurdy

Parkinson works as an Egyptology professor at Oxford University and is a former curator of the British Museum’s Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan. He has written on the study of LGBT histories and ways in which to extend this historiography into ancient civilizations which carried different signifiers, gender roles, and meanings from our own. In an essay about his process for writing this book, he emphasized the potential social impact of engaging in the historiographic work. In other essays of his, he also describes the importance of not overextending modern labels and identities when studying behaviours and acts that feel familiar to our current moment, as in their original context they may have served a different purpose. As he states himself, “such historical interpretation is not a purely ‘academic’ matter, and research on such topics has to be irrefutably accurate or it risks a backward step.”

In my personal statement for admission to this program, I wrote that reaching into the past to find evidence of yourself can help legitimize your identity to a present that is looking for a reason to dismiss you. Museum exhibitions can help in this process, and I have had emotional moments in LGBT-themed exhibitions when confronted with effective framing of these artifacts. But it has to be done responsibly.

The treatment of these artifacts by the museums that hold them play an important part in how the public views the artifacts, and the people who created them. By framing the amphora within a context of same sex desire, questions of similarities between today's gay community and the pederastic relationships of ancient Greece come to mind.

Close Up on the British Museum Amphora. (c) The Trustees of the British Museum. Source.

The homosocial relationships between men in ancient Greece are often discussed as being early representations of gay relationships, and having the amphora included in exhibitions about LGBT identities and histories adopts this perspective. Parkinson also frames the amphora as representative in this way. As depicted in this vase, bearded men are courting younger athletic youth, reflecting how these pederastic relationships served a function unique to ancient Greece. When I asked my friend & resident ancient Greece expert Sydney Rodrigues about this phenomenon, she had the following to say:

But when are representations of same sex desires ever a quick conversation?

As my parasocial dream professor Dr. Parkinson wrote, “I myself am not a historian of sexuality, but simply a gay Egyptologist who specialises in Middle Kingdom literature from around 1900–1650 BC.” I currently don’t think of myself as a historian of sexuality, but I think that’s slowly changing as more and more of my thesis is looking into queer theory and applying it to museums and Egyptology. But I am a gay Egyptologist, and the instinct to look at ancient Egypt and find myself there has been present since my 101 essay on Women in Egypt.

I focus on erotic artifacts because I am fascinated by what they reveal about humanity. The two things that are consistent across all cultures, from ancient Greece and Egypt into Medieval Europe, are death and sex. And we know about death: the funerary cult of Egypt, the Catholic rites of 15th century England. But death is also stagnant, it remains buried and preserved, waiting to be uncovered. Sex is elusive, a set of actions rarely depicted in material culture, and even more difficult to preserve through centuries of Western society creating taboos around discussion of such material.

(c) The Trustees of the British Museum. Source.

This amphora is a glimpse into the life of ancient Greeks, both in its use to serve wine and its depictions of a moment of life — relationships between men. Currently, the online collections of the British Museum list the amphora as not on display, but it does have an extensive exhibition history. In 2018–2019 it was included in the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition titled Desire, love and identity: exploring LGBTQ identities. A decade earlier, in 2007–2008, the amphora was part of an exhibition at the Barbican Centre in London called Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquities to Now. 

I am intrigued by the moment when a gay man wanders into these exhibitions and peers into a display case to see this amphora. Does he see himself reflected back at him? Or is the art style too foreign, the cultural context too different from his own? Do the years of colonial interference alter his understanding of the artifact? This phenomenon is described by Elizabeth Freeman as erotohistoriography, a queer theory concept which is currently taking up a lot of real estate in my brain, and it has huge applicability for museums. Maybe by the time I’m finished this program I’ll have some answers to these questions. But more likely, I’ll continue to study the past, and look for myself there. 

THESIS REFLECTION: QUEER THEORY 101

BY: NICOLE RITCHIE

So what is queer theory? As outlined in my first post, my goal is to queer museums.  But, what does ‘queering’ even mean? 

In order to provide a general understanding of queer theory that will contextualize my future posts, I decided to dedicate a post to defining this field.  Like any attempt at briefly defining a major body of knowledge, I struggle to be brief and concise while not over simplifying. Therefore, please note that there are major gaps, oversights, and simplifications below, as well as a clear emphasis on the academic development of ‘queer theory’ rather than a history of the term ‘queer’ and queer identities/communities/activism.

Queer theory emerged in the 1990s in the USA after the AIDS crisis, an event that greatly affected the feminist and gay communities and its politics.  Teresa de Lauretis is credited with first using ‘queer theory’ at a conference at UCSC in 1990.  The term, which has historically been used as slander, was, at that point, being reclaimed and adopted by a burgeoning body of academics and activists.  Most famously, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) are credited as the founding queer theory texts.  On the most basic level, these two texts interrogate the binary structure of heterosexuality and homosexuality and the culturally constructed performance of gender, respectively.  Sedgwick and Butler marked a move into questioning the social, cultural, and political structures and systems that both create and perpetuate those identities and activities seen as ‘non-normative’, and thus an interrogation of the ‘normative’.

Meme of Judith Butler

In the last twenty-five years, the field has grown vastly.  Queer theory has been utilized as a lens in almost all disciplines from the humanities and social sciences to engineering and medicine. In order to provide a taste of the diverse definitions of ‘queer theory’, here are some brief quotes by several of the ‘big’ queer theorists.  There is also, by no means, an agreement as to what ‘queer’ means, what queer theory seeks, and what queer world-making entails.

“…queer refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time” (6).

– Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005)

“Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (1).

– José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)

“…queer must insist on disturbing, on queering, social organizations as such – on disturbing, therefore, and on queering ourselves and our investment in such organization.  For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.  And so, when I argue, as I am to do here, that the burden of queerness is to be located less in the assertion of an oppositional political identity than in opposition to politics as the governing fantasy realizing, in an always indefinite future…” (17). 

– Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004)

And what about ‘queer’ in our society today?  Generally, I would say that we think of the Q in the LGBTQ acronym, or the extended one of LGBTTIQQ2SA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning, 2-spirited, and asexuality).  Queer is a growing ‘non-identity’ adopted by those not partaking in ‘normative’ labels or values or activities, such as genderqueer, pansexuality, or non-goal-oriented sexual practices. 

Thus, ‘queer’ has been taken up in both academic and community environments to a variety of ends.  Furthermore, I would like to note that I have not truly touched on various complexities of the relationship of queer theory with feminism, with queer activism, and more.

However, I will leave it at that – I recommend checking out this humorous article entitled “What the F@#$ is Queer Theory?”.  Hopefully, we can flush out some of these brief points and any further curiousities or comments about ‘queer’ in the comments, as well as elucidate my use of queer theory for my thesis in future posts!