Born On This Day- August 23rd... Louise Nevelson

Nevelson by Avedon

Louise Nevelson is known for her abstract expressionist “crates” grouped together to form a new creation. She used found objects or everyday discarded things in her assemblages, one of which was 3 stories high. Nevelson: "When you put together things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created."

She was born Leah Berliawsky in Kiev in 1899, & was raised in Rockland, Maine From early childhood Nevelson wanted to be a sculptor, with wood as her medium. It took her more than 6+ decades to make her mark in the art world. Nevelson had one unhappy marriage when she was 18 years old. The union with business man-Charles Nevelson lasted for a decade, & produced one child, a son-Myron. Nevelson left her marriage in 1931 & devoted herself to her art.

She would go an entire decade before her 1st exhibit, which was failure. Nevelson had a 2nd show in 1943 & sold nothing. She took the entire show back to her studio & destroyed every piece. After changing direction, & after years of creating small scale pieces, Nevelson's breakthrough large works in wood were critically hailed in the late 1950s.

She infused abstract art with her personal story: the epic Jewish migration to the United States between the 1880s & the 1920s, her life as a woman artist, & her involvement in American modernism functioned as the source for her vast body of work.

I have a keen interest in American 20th century art, but I know more than even a dilettante like me should about Louise Nevelson. I had a friend in the 1980s, who wrote a one-woman show about Louise Nevelson, & I was present for most of her research & preparation.

Nevelson was the entrée for the USA at the Venice Biennale in 1963, but was still not able to make a living from the sale of her work Around this time she met the young artist-Diana MacKown. They soon moved in together. A new period of success & a more concentrated, engaged work followed. Most biographies & Nevelson’s NY Times obituary fail to mention their 26 year relationship. Nevelson’s son & heir had a metal door installed at the apartment the women shared above their studios. He had been estranged from his mother most of his life, but Nevelson had made no provisions for MacKown in her will. MacKown was supported by Jasper Johns, Edward Ablee, John Cage, & Merce Cunningham when she filed a lawsuit.

I met Nevelson once, at an opening of an exhibit at the Pace Gallery in the mid-1970s. She was there in her trademark scarf & gypsy garb. I was there with a contingency of friends of the actor- Michael Higgins, with whom I was acquainted & with whom Nevelson was acquainted. She sat in the back room, & received selected visitors who came to pay her homage. Tammy Grimes was part of our group & next in line to pay her respects. Nevelson looked at her blankly. Grimes seemed to have blushed: “I’m Tammy Grimes, I am an actress.” Nevelson still looked puzzled, but polite & rather regal: “How nice to see you”.

“You see, I think that we have measurements in our bodies. Measurements in our eyes. Look, dear, we walk on 2 feet. So we're vertical. That doesn't mean the work has to be vertical, but it means there is a weight within ourselves, or this flight. All these things are within the being: weight, measure & color. If the work is good work, it is built on these laws & principles that we have within ourselves. So when you use a vertical line or a horizontal line, or a texture or the way the shadow falls or a thinner piece or a heavier piece, it all kind of satisfies something in the soul - or, I don't like the word soul, satisfies something within the deed.You add or subtract until you feel. . . the form, the principle, that something that makes the house stand, that makes you stand."

Born On This Day- August 21st... Illustrator Aubrey Beardsley

Because of my interest in Oscar Wilde, the man who would become my husband, introduced me to the work of an astonishing late 19th centurt artist. He gave me a book about Aubrey Beardsley, an English artist who was often associated with Oscar Wilde. Wilde's publisher, John Lane, invited Beardsley to illustrate the English edition of the play Salome. When it was published in 1894, both the play & the witty, provocative, & blatantly erotic illustrations created a sensation. That same year Beardsley became famous as the art editor of The Yellow Book, a new arts & letters periodical that Lane inaugurated. Beardsley's stunning black-and-white drawings, title-pages, & covers helped make the new quarterly a great success. The Yellow Book also quickly a target of moralists concerned about the influence of the decadent movement on English society & art. One critic described Beardsley's designs for the periodical as "diseased, weird, macbre, & sinister."

Considering the shortness of his life, he died of TB at age 25, Beardsley's achievements are astonishing. A highly original creator, he transformed the art of illustration & profoundly influenced artists of his own & future generations.

His expert draftsmanship made his drawings particularly suitable to the technical advances in printing at the end of the nineteenth century. He came to maturity at a time peculiarly suited to his genius, when theories of decadence & aestheticism expression to perverse sexuality & fetishism of all kinds. Beardsley's work is sexually frank & sometimes pornographic. He drew erect penises & stylized pubic hair, & he fetishized objects such as shoes & cloths. He also depicted sexual obsession, lesbianism, sadomasochism, & male homosexuality with an honesty & passion intended to shock & provoke.

Beardsley is viewed a satirical artist, with a gift for caricature & the grotesque. He also created revolutionary designs & images & patterns of surpassing beauty. His influence has been immense, & can be discerned in the stylized lines of the new Art Nouveau movement.

Born On This Day- August 19th... Gustave Caillebotte

Several years ago, a favorite chocolate company- TCHO, out of San Francisco, had a series of bars with beautiful labels featuring Impressionist paintings from the de Young Museum’s Masterpieces from the Musee d’ Orsay exhibit. One bar featured an image that held my interest in no small way. It was a detail from an astonishing painting of 2 shirtless, muscled men planing a wood floor. The artist was someone that I was not familiar with. I was soon on the hunt to learn all about him. The Husband pointed out the same image was on the cover of a book of 19th century gay erotica, a gift from him 20 years ago. Perhaps I had just jumped right into reading that book & never studied the cover. In the Summer of 2010, I became fascinated with painter- Gustave Caillebotte, reading everything I could find on the artist & studying copies of his paintings.


Gustave Caillebotte used to be dismissed as a minor outsider of French Impressionism. He was much younger than the main gang. He was personally very rich, & collected & supported their work. He was an excellent curator, & arranged many of their exhibitions. He paintings were rather somewhat non-impressionistic. He was modest about his talents. In his latter years, he painted less, devoting his time to gardening & boating. But from his 1st participation in an Impressionist exhibition, with paintings of modern Parisian life, he showed an entirely singular vein of invention: painting male nudes & producing work with an overt gay sensibility. For all his adult life he feared he would die young, & did, for no clear reason, at age 45.

Caillebotte stands apart among the Impressionists. His paintings depict working-class men in an urban context in full transformation. Caillebotte also used very innovative perspectives. His paintings are rather personal, autobiographical. You feel as if you were spying on a very private man, whose short life remains a mystery. He was an artist who was an Impressionist by association rather than by style or temperament.

His career as an artist feels unresolved. Certainly it was short. He stopped painting in a focused way in his 30s. By the 1890s he had become a semi-recluse at his estate- Petit-Gennevilliers, a property on the banks of the Seine near Argenteuil. He ceased showing his work at age 34 & devoted himself to gardening & to building & racing yachts, & with his friend Renoir, who often came to stay at Petit-Gennevilliers, they would have discussions on art, politics, literature, & philosophy. Caillebotte died there.

Self Portrait of the artist

His paintings & drawings are full of male bodies, often with a concealed face, often setting the bourgeois with the working class.The painting that grabbed me is The Floor Scrapers (Les raboteurs de parquet). It shows men at work, shirtless, showing their muscular bodies. His row men also produce erotic feelings. In the Self-Portrait at the Easel (Autoportrait au chevalet), the artist is painting in his studio, while in the background a man, the bottom half of his face concealed by the painter's arm, reads on a coach. A through line of melancholy flows from the paintings... & a definitive homo-eroticism.

Self Portrait... he seems to have been a beautiful man

I knew nothing of Caillebotte before that chocolate bar, but I enjoyed the research of his enigmatic life. He never married or seemed to have any relationship with a woman, spending his time gardening, rowing,& befriending & painting interesting, handsome men. In 2010, when I first posted my proposition that Caillebotte might have been a homosexual, I received a comment from one his distant relatives, insisting that such a thing that could not be possible.

This is the image from the chocolate. It started a summer of research about the painter.

Born On This Day- August 16th... Wolfgang Tillmans

Wolfgang Tillmans has a special feeling for males. In his portrait photographs, he examines them from every angle, indoors & out, in groups & alone, clothed & naked. Sometimes he treats them as objects of desire & other times as objects of curiosity. Despite his camera’s studied distance from its subjects, his photographs read as very personal statements: "Here are the people & the things I like & this is the way I like to see them". This is why I feel so seduced by them." Tillmans brings eroticism to his photographs of fashion, the natural world, city skylines & club culture.

Tillmans moved to NYC in 1994, where he met & fell in love with the German painter Jochen Klein. After moving to England, Tillmans lived with Klein until he died of AIDS-related complications in 1997. When the German born artist was awarded the Turner prize in 2000, the feedback was quite pointed. Tillmans, a mere 32 years old, was the first photographer & the first non-British person to be given the prize. He was known for shooting London's street culture, the rise of Gay Pride, the nightlife of the clubbing generation. He worked for The Face Magazine. The studied authenticity of his photographs was thought of as an exercise in style, slight & understated. Some critics considered Tillmans to not even be an artist.

In 2001, Tillmans was awarded first prize in the competition for the design of the AIDS-Memorial for the City of Munich. In 2002, he filmed the video for Pet Shop Boys’ Home & Dry, composed almost entirely of shots documenting the mice living in the London Underground System.

A decade later, Tillmans is intensely fashionable & internationally acclaimed. He has had museum retrospectives all over the world.

Born On This Day- August 6th... Andy Warhol

I remember quite well, my parents shaking their heads & saying- " that is not art... it is a painting of a soup can!", when I expressed my appreciation for the work of Andy Warhol at a very young age. The point of the matter was, I really "got him", even at age 8... or especially at age 8. Andy Warhol was the subject of much scorn & derision from the critics, the public & my parents, but he was arguably the most important artist of the 20th century.

Andrew Warhol, sometimes referred to as the "Pope of Pop," embraced pop art, fascinated with the commercialism of popular icons in media & in everyday life. Warhol helped to shape pop culture & foresaw our fascination with the media to the extreme extent to which it is now accessible. Claiming that each individual would have his or her "15 minutes of fame," Warhol would certainly not be surprised by the popularity of such venues as YouTube, MP3 music downloads, American Idol, The Facebook, Reality TV, or blogs.

A master & practitioner of multiple creative forms of expression, Warhol was a painter, writer, music producer, avant-garde filmmaker, magazine creator, sculptor, & photographer. Focusing on diverse & contrasting interests at once, he was fascinated with all forms of media, a blurring of gender identities, & the contrast between a sense of celebrity & privacy.

He was a ground breaker in the idea of self as product. He even set up his studio as "The Factory", overseeing a staff that turned out prints, silkscreens & products of his work. He was still a remarkable & transcendent artist & a commanding craftsman.

The Husband & I once saw an enchanting exhibit of his commercial drawings from the early 1950s, mostly of ladies shoes, produced for advertising. These works predated his huge fame, but the essence of what he was to bring was already there. I have allot of material by & about him, including the very readable Andy Warhol's Diaries where he writes about his relationships with several men. His long time lover was interior designer Jed Johnson.

Warhol died after successful gall bladder surgery from a heart arrythmia in 1987. Johnson died in the TWA flight 800 explosion off the coast of Long Island in 1996. Warhol remains my favorite artist.

"An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have."

Unusual Photos… A castle in Flint!

What… A castle in Flint!.

A beautiful photographic reportage of Castles by maenamor.wordpress.com

Maen Amor photoreportage on Castles in Wales - This one on the River Dee

Tagged: Arts, Castello Dal Pozzo, maen amor, photographic reportage, photography, Things to see, Travel

Born On This Day- June 18th... Berenice Abbott

If you were to click on the label at the bottom of my posts you would discover that I have a very real passion for Photography, whether it is formal portraiture, commercial work, art photography, or found snapshots. I have a sizable & thought provoking collection of vintage photographs of men being affectionate, which I like to share with readers.

My passion for photography + my keen interest in architecture brings me to today’s birthday- Berenice Abbott. Abbott was a celebrated photographer of NYC architecture. She shot using a Century Universal Camera which produced 8 x 10 inch negatives; this large format camera was the instrument that Abbott used to photographed NYC with diligence & attention to detail. Her work has provided an historical chronicle of many now destroyed buildings & neighborhoods of Manhattan.

Abbott by Man Ray 1925

Abbott by Hank O'Neal 1979

During the Great Depression, Abbott was hired by the Federal Art Project (FAP) as a project supervisor for the Changing New York project. She would take the photographs of the city, but had assistants to help her both in the field & in the office. This arrangement allowed Abbott to devote all her time to producing, printing, & exhibiting her photographs. By the time she resigned from the FAP in 1939, she had produced 305 photographs that were added to the collection at the Museum of the City of New York.

Self Portrait 1937

When she first arrived in NYC, Abbott shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with writer Djuna Barnes, philosopher Kenneth Burke, & literary critic Malcolm Cowley. She pursued journalism, but soon became interested in theater & art, inspired by her friends Eugene O'Neill & Man Ray. Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923, when Man Ray, looking for somebody who knew nothing about photography & would do as he said, hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. Abbott: "I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else." Ray was impressed by her darkroom work & allowed her to use his studio to take her own photographs.

In 1935, Abbott fell in love & moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with the art critic- Elizabeth McCausland. They were a couple for 30+ years until McCausland's death in 1965. In the early 1960s Abbott & McCausland traveled US Highway # 1 from Florida to Maine, with Abbott shooting the small town & automobile-related architecture. The project resulted in more than 2,500 photographs. Not only was Abbott a photographer, but also an inventor & innovator. She developed the distortion easel, which created unusual effects on images developed in a darkroom, & the telescopic lighting pole, known today by photographers as an "autopole," to which lights can be attached at any level.

Shortly after McCausland’s death, Abbott underwent a lung operation. She was told she should move from NYC because of the air pollution. She bought a rundown house in Maine, remaining there until her death in 1991. Abbott continued to work after her move to Maine. Her last book was A Portrait of Maine in 1968.

Born On This Day- July 9th... Artist David Hockney

"The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist."

He was already a noted & accomplished painter in his native England, but David Hockney's style, point of view, & medium changed from oils to acrylics when he moved to LA.,a city he had fantasized about, in 1963.

Hockney: "Within a week of arriving there in this strange big city, not knowing a soul, I'd passed the driving test, bought a car, driven to Las Vegas & won some money, got myself a studio, started painting, all within a week.& I thought, it's just how I imagined it would be."

The Hockney that I know best is the painter of sunny California skies, swimming pools, palm trees & boys. His work in this period seems to me to be a modernist slant on color Polaroids & snapshots from the life I was brushing up against when I attended college in L.A. from 1972-76. I actually attended an all-boy pool party at a famous producer's Beverly Hills estate & Hockney was one of the guests.

He is absolutely one of the Husband & my favorite artists, & though I would love to own his paintings (they sell in the millions), as a lowly working class gentleman, I am having to be content with my "coffee table" books & postcards of his work.

David Hockney is also notable as a draftsman, printmaker, stage designer & photographer (photo collage). His personal style,with his trademark round glasses & mop of blond hair, & spirited personality also engaged the Husband & I & we took to wearing his colorful horizontal striped ties & Izod shirts in the early 80s. Hockney has always been openly gay & has enjoyed a variety of relationships with men, describing himself as a "playboy".

He was so important to me that for a certain period in the 1980s, I emulated his style, wearing Izod shirts with knit striped ties & round glasses. In the new century he continues to inform my life by with his talent & style. I admire his talent & his bank account.

Born On This Day- July 5th... Overachiever, Jean Cocteau

My husband is a hyphenate (most people in Portland are), as an artist-designer-set designer, but he is a bit of an underachiever, compared with poet-artist-playwright-actor-designer-photographer-filmmaker-boxing manager- Jean Cocteau. Cocteau published his 1st volume of poems when he was 19. He was a well regarded artist & popular man-about-town in Paris, with the success of several ballets & plays that he wrote in his late 20s. In the early 1920s, Cocteau's lover, writer Raymond Radiguet, died of typhoid fever; the despondent Cocteau escaped the pain of his loss with the help of opium. In 1930, Cocteau tried film making as the medium best suited for his artistic expression. His stylized, homoerotic films are taken from Cocteau's drawings: bold, simple strokes, accentuated eyes, minimalist outlines & profiles, & erotic, surrealistic portraits that dominate the sets of his films. In his later films, Cocteau included bits of his poetry written in his distinctive handwriting, samples of his drawings & paintings, narration, & cast himself in certain roles.

Cocteau’s work is marked by whimsical special effects & exotic landscapes & themes of narcissism, the Orpheus myth, mirrors, passages to secret worlds, fairy tales, flowers, & beautiful people in iconographic settings. In 1937, Cocteau met Jean Marais, the most famous of his lovers, & helped make his talented, handsome, & athletic protégé into one of France's most beloved movie stars. Cocteau made with Marais, such classics films as La belle et la bête & Orphée.

Cocteau by Modigliani

Cocteau encouraged artists to speak out against unjust political domination, & yet he was burdened by the open secrets of his opium use & homosexuality, which made him particularly vulnerable to attack by the right-wing government. During the Nazi Occupation, Cocteau's plays were banned & Cocteau was a victim of physical violence & homophobic insults. But still, Cocteau wrote, made films, traveled, & attracted famous friends, patrons, & protégés throughout the rest of his life. Cocteau was elected to the prestigious Académie Français. The artist died of a heart attack in 1963, just an hour after learning of singer Édith Piaf's death. He wrote more than 30 volumes of poetry, 7 novels, 24 plays, 11 ballets, 6 operas, 6 full length films, & 100s of drawings & photographs. He contributed to the worlds of publishing, graphic design, clothing design, & interior design. Jean Cocteau continues to this day as one of France's most famous, & most adored, cultural icons. A fascinating gay man of the 20th century. How about Adrien Brody in the title role of the film of his life story?

Born On This Day- May 15th... American Artist Jasper Johns

I have a passion for 20th century American art, & I have always been fascinated with the 1950s, when these geniuses produced their astonishing works while closeted, but whose gayness was really an open secret: Montgomery Clift & James Dean, Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Lincoln Kirstein, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, Langston Hughes, Philip Johnson.

Jasper Johns was a Southern Gentleman from South Carolina. In 1953, after a stint in the army, he moved to NYC with the notion of becoming of an artist or writer. Within just a few years he had created the iconic- Flag, & White Flag & within a half a decade he would have 4 paintings in the permanent collection of MOMA. Within a decade, he would be considered the greatest living American artist.


Jasper Johns fell in love with fellow artist-Robert Rauschenberg, who became an inspiration to the younger man. Rauschenberg: “We gave each other permission.” Spurring each other on creatively, Johns painted many works of familiar objects: numerals, letters, maps, flags, letters, that captivated the art world, when NYC was the center of all things art. Johns & Robert Rauschenberg were lovers from 1955-1961, the era of their best & most important work. They had living/working lofts on the same building & went freely between their spaces. Although the  men lived & worked together, it was Johns who received the most acclaim.

Jasper Johns: “I don’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings,” He painted conventional subjects, which left the critics to ponder the explanation of his rough brushstrokes & saturnine surfaces. Johns’s work is about tension between knowing & not knowing, the explained & the unexplained. His paintings carry a secret.

His 1955 work-Target With Plaster Casts consisted of 9 wooden boxes with hinged doors, each box held of a body part. One of them was a detailed penis. A representative of the Museum of Modern Art, asked I if it would be acceptable if that particular box stayed closed? Johns: “It would be all right to keep the lid closed some of the time but not all of the time.”

In NYC, Johns met musical composer John Cage & his partner choreographer Merce Cunningham,a significant contributor to the modern dance world concert stages. Johns collaborated with Cunnigham’s work by designing sets & costumes, & became an artistic advisor to his company. Johns, Cage & Cunningham collaborated in 1973 on Cunningham’s piece- Un Jour ou Deux. These 4 gay men, never displayed explicit homosexual content in any of their works.


Johns & Rauschenberg split up because of the discomfort of being recognized as a couple outside of their circle. Rauscheberg: “What had been sensitive & tender became gossip” . Johns recalled the time he was reading Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,& Rauschenberg stated: “One day they’ll be writing about us like that.” Johns was not pleased by Rauschenberg’s comparison to the lesbian couple.


Their breakup was so bitter that they both left NYC, & they both returned to the south for an extended period. They didn't speak for more than a decade. In 1961, as the relationship was ending, Johns produced a painting- In Memory of My Feelings, Frank O’Hara, taking the name from a poem by O’Hara about gay love & the price paid for suppressing it. The poem's first line: “My quietness has a man in it.”. Johns became reclusive, & moved to an estate in  Connecticut. He almost never gives interviews. Johns’ & Rauschenberg’s relationship was the deepest & most important of their entire lives. Rauschenberg died 2 years ago this week

Robert Rauschenberg: “Jasper was soft, beautiful, lean, & poetic. I have photos of him then that would break your heart.”

There Once Was An Old Queer Named Lear

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea green boat,

They took some honey, & plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

& sang to a small guitar,

'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

But what shall we do for a ring?'

They sailed away, for a year & a day,

To the land where the Bong-tree grows

& there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

'Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'

So they took it away, & were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, & slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

& hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

It is as simple as ABC to take joy in a gay 19th century writer named as the notable innovator of nonsense.

Today marks the 199th birthday of Edward Lear, an important English illustrator & landscape painter, but more widely known as the writer of an original kind of nonsense verse & for his perfect limericks. His genius is clear in his nonsense poems, with a world of peculiar, phantasmagorical, preposterous creature in nonsense word, with a dash of deep underlying melancholy. Their quality is matched in the limerick & his pen &ink drawings.

Lear was a homosexual who suffered all his life from ill health & depression that he named- “The Morbids”.

He mostly lived abroad. Even though he was naturally timid, he was a constant & courageous traveler who explored: Italy, Greece, Albania, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, India & Ceylon. An indefatigable artist, he produced great number of pen & watercolor sketches of great topographical accuracy. He made his living from these pieces & large oil paintings.

After his nomadic life he lived with his celebrated cat –Foss in San Remo, on the Mediterranean coast, at a house he named "Villa Tennyson." For companions he counted on a circle of friends, correspondents, & his chef- Giorgis. Foss died in 1886 & was buried with some ceremony in a garden at Villa Tennyson. After a long decline in his health, Lear died at his villa in 1888. Lear's funeral was a sad, solitary affair; not one of Lear's many lifelong friends being able to attend.

In his lifetime, Lear published 3 volumes of bird & animal drawings, 7 illustrated travel books, 4 books of nonsense: The Book of Nonsense (1869), Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany & Alphabets (1871), More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, & Botany (1872), & Laughable Lyrics (1877), plus a posthumous release- Queery Leary Nonsense (1911).

There was an Old Man on a hill,
Who seldom, if ever, stood still;
He ran up & down,
In his Grandmother's gown,
Which adorned that Old Man on a hill.


The Post Apocalyptic Bohemian: Stephen
He liked men for no tangible reason
A frontal lobotomy
Cured him of sodomy
But ruined his plans for the season.

Dirty

The first time I saw a Tom of Finland drawing was in a downtown Spokane used book store near the bus station in the 1970. The image, buried at the back of a men’s physique magazine (this is pre-MEN’S HEALTH, but the same idea), was in a small ad for more “special” publications. It jumped out at me like a great big erection. It depicted a pair of muscular butch men with big chins & broad grins grabbing each other's bubble butts & straining packages while winking at the reader. I was startled & aroused. Tom of Finland's pornographic drawings of hunky, fuck-booted, big butted beefcakes banging the booty in charcoals, pencil, ink, & watercolors had my full attention, & remonded me that I would need to get to a gym.

Tom was born Touko Laaksonen in Kaarina, Finland, on this day-May 8, in 1920. His work is literally the masturbatory fantasies of a lonely young homosexual Finnish boy; he began drawing in his bedroom in the 1940s. Tom worked as an illustrator in the Finnish advertising business until the early 1970s, when he became a full time gay pornographer. He sold the idea of the male body as a pleased, pleasuring & pleasured thing decades before Calvin Klein thought of it.


Tom's greatest achievement was in drawing gay men who were masculine, happy & proud at a time when they were supposed to be effeminate, neurotic & shameful. This is certainly the reason why so many gay men are Tom of Finland fans. Today's gay porn is just a footnote to Tom of Finland, endless loops of a garage full of “regular guys” with huge cocks & massive pecs having spontaneous, shameless sex at the drop of the monkey wrench. His achievement was more than just making gay men feel good about themselves, or the feel of leather.

Tom had a profound influence on gay culture because, in a world that insisted gay men were sissies, Tom portrayed them as confident, macho & aggressive. Every drawing features a lumberjack, cop, construction worker, cowboy, biker, sailor or soldier. Not a florist, choreographer or dress designer in the bunch. He suggested something more than the masculinity in gay men. Tom turned it around on the straight world; you couldn't be masculine unless you were gay.

Before Tom, no one drew men like he did, unabashed sex objects & sex subjects, giving them exaggerated big chins, strong jaws, full lips, bubble butts, full bulges. His idea of masculinity & virility end up looking so... well, yummy. They seem to be seeking the attentions of the powerful Abercrombie & Fitch photographer Bruce Weber (a big Tom fan), or perhaps a Levi's commercial.

Tom's big break came in the 1950s from Physique Pictorial, semi-legal gay American magazine disguised as a straight men's bodybuilding magazine, which frequently put Tom's men on the cover. Half a century later, & 19 years after his death in 1991, the world has turned around & real men who look like Tom's drawings now appear on the cover of magazines like Men's Health. I was reading one while waiting to get my haircut at 7 Bucks A Whack (the perfect Tom of Finland business name) & the thing was full of advice on how straight men can turn themselves into something out of Tom of Finland.

The big question begs- is it art or is it porn? David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe & Andy Warhol were admirers & collectors of Tom's work. Not bad for a pornographer. He continues to have gallery shows & his work is in the permanent collections of 7 museums, including MOMA. While the debate goes on whether Tom's fuck machines constitute art, anyone can see that the macho men of Tom of Finland are hung… they're hung in museums.


* These were the most post-able images I could dig up.