The filmmakers involved in the biopic Tom of Finland, which is playing at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, didn’t necessarily set out to be political, but the subject’s inherent politics nonetheless surfaced in the six or so years since they began making it. Tom of Finland tells the life story of Touko Laaksonen, the gay artist born in 1920 whose explicit drawings of pneumatic, happy-go-lucky, often leather-clad men engaged in all kinds of configurations of gay sex date back to the ‘40s and would become globally iconic by the ‘80s.
“What’s happening in the world—in Chechnya and Iran—is making it a political movie,” said Pekka Strang, who plays Tom, during an interview at New York’s Smyth Hotel. “We don’t have a political agenda, we’re telling a story, but the world’s in a strange place so the perspective is a bit different than a few years ago.”
Laaksonen, like present-day gay men in Chechnya and Iran, faced persecution for his sexuality from the likes of cops patrolling the cruising parks he frequented and from countries that had restrictions on the portrayal of sex (especially gay sex) in art. But even more universally resonant today was the sunny tone that dominates much of Laaksonen’s some 3,500 drawings. Tom’s men were invested in the fun of sex and are largely free of the pathos and shame that have been culturally associated with sex among gay men (and that some gay men having this sex even today still struggle to shake). The shameless smiles of Tom’s men were ahead of their time, and they remain so even in 2017.
As a biopic, Tom of Finland is fairly straightforward, showing Laaksonen’s early days serving in World War II to the blossoming of his career in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s (his public career launched with the publication of non-explicit pictures of his were published in muscle/bodybuilding magazines) to his ‘80s journey to America, where he was embraced as an icon of sex positivity and liberation. Given the kink present in Laaksonen’s work, the movie is neither as explicit nor as sanitized as it could be—there are frank depictions of cruising and gay sex—and it deftly juggles Laaksonen’s private sex life, his public profile, and his somewhat fraught relationship with his sister Kaija (Jessica Grabowsky), who did not know about her brother’s art for decades and then forbade him to come out from behind the Tom of Finland moniker so as not to risk sullying the family name. A particularly intricate point of tension arises during the film’s depiction of Laaksonen’s relationship to the AIDS crisis that began in the early ‘80s (in the movie, he feels responsible for promoting the gay sex that soon became linked to a deadly virus), though Tom of Finland lacks a serious examination of the body ideals Laaksonen’s envisioned and then later, through things like steroids, became a reality.
I spoke with Strang, Grabowsky, and the film’s Finnish director Dome Karukoski about Tom of Finland, and below is an edited and condensed transcript of our discussion.
JEZEBEL: What familiarity did you have with Tom’s work prior to making the movie?
Dome Karukoski (director): I’ve had different phases with Tom’s life and art. The first is you remember when you’re a small boy growing up and I remember these moments when one of my friends had either stolen or found a comic book, it must have been a Kake, and us giggling about the big penises and just what was happening. It just felt fun.
The secondary then was when [screenwriter and producer] Aleksi Bardy suggested that we should do a film about Tom of Finland, I took out a couple of his biographies and just learned about his histories. I knew a lot about the art, but nothing about Touko. I was mystified. After the Finnish gay promotion law [similar to Russia’s current gay propaganda law] was overturned in 1999, the art started popping out, there was a mystery behind it.
Pekka Strang (“Tom”): I knew very little about Touko Laaksonen, because I don’t think anyone did. The Tom of Finland brand is much bigger than the guy behind the art. I have some blurry memories of the images. When you see them, you feel like you aren’t seeing them for the first time—that you’ve seen them somewhere before.
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