Tom of Finland
By Mark Swartz
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Tom–who was born Touko Laaksonen in 1920, on the south coast of Finland–had a fantasy life both single-minded and boundless. And after nearly 40 years of making homoerotic drawings for magazines, his talent for indulging in these fantasies began to win him recognition beyond the readership of those publications. The first successful public exhibit of his drawings was held in 1978, and from that time until his death in 1991 he enjoyed considerable fame, mostly within the gay community. He posed for Mapplethorpe, and the resulting photograph–which not surprisingly shows a man who looks nothing like the superidealized characters in his drawings–is the only non-Tom work at TBA. Fortunately, Tom looks like someone who enjoyed a good joke.
If you look at them with a purely aesthetic eye, they’re miserable. As representations of the male figure, they lack any sense of psychological depth or understanding of anatomy. Rather than sensuality or sexuality, they offer nothing more than a flippant acknowledgment of all the most obvious ways that two or more male bodies can interlock.
Seltzer probably expends more energy convincing his models to assume the poses he wants than he does taking the pictures and developing them. More than photographic prowess, it takes diplomacy, tact, and imagination to get a woman to fit martini glasses over her nipples.
