‘Hate the politics, love the uniform,” would pretty much sum up Touko Valio Laaksonen’s attitude towards the Wehrmacht soldiers he encountered as a young, conscripted anti-aircraft officer in the Finnish army, fighting alongside the Germans in the second world war. After the war, Laaksonen began signing his commercial drawings for physique magazines with the moniker Tom of Finland, and the very different uniform of the sexual outlaw, inspired by American biker culture (and in particular by Marlon Brando in the 1953 movie The Wild One), replaced field grey with leather and denim, a hyper-masculine look that developed in gay culture from the 1950s onward.
Pert-bottomed and conspicuously well hung, six-packed and nipples erected, poured into their jeans and their leather trousers, Tom of Finland’s groups of hunks and Muscle Marys indulge in all sorts of horseplay. They suck, they rim, they fist, they fuck. They pose and they cruise, they watch and, given half a chance, they join in. There’s a bit of lighthearted BDSM, but not much else to vary the routine. What a tiring round their days must be. Away from the magazine page or beyond the edge of the drawing they might complain, if they had the time, about their onerous moisturising regimes, the daily workouts and depilation routines. Never mind the same old outfits every day, or that as soon as one scene has ended another’s begun. Even when they’re tied to a tree and being thrashed with a belt they seem happy enough, and no one ever screams their safe word.
Tom of Finland’s drawings depict men doing things with other men, all the time. Even when they’re trying to look butch or mouthing the occasional yelp, they’re cheery, strong-jawed types who never say no and never take offence, living the lifestyle, 24/7. All of which is a fantasy, of course, and that’s mostly the point. I go from drawing to drawing, in search of something I’ve never seen before, some novel practice or overlooked kink I can try at home later, but it’s the same old same old. This was one of the creative problems the Marquis de Sade faced, writing his 120 Days of Sodom. There are only so many variations to play with before the characters get snuffed out, in one unspeakable way or another. And then it all starts up again.
I can imagine Beryl Cook, always a gay ally, doing an affectionate parody of Tom of Finland’s world, but she wouldn’t have got much of a look in, back in the day, at the exclusively male Mineshaft in Manhattan’s Meatpacking district, or the Backstreet bar in London’s East End, for which Tom of Finland designed the club’s logo. If Plymouth had a leather bar, any visits Cook might have made are not recorded. Tom, on the other hand, would probably have preferred to snap all his pencils rather than go cruising at the Ladies Bowls Club, or spend much time in the back bar of the Lockyer Tavern in Plymouth, a welcoming, lairy pub where they let all sorts in, commemorated in one of Cook’s paintings.
Cook did venture beyond Plymouth. She took in the sights and the frisson of danger in Marseille, where she painted a hooker out walking her dogs. She painted a pair of fur-coated lesbian ladies off for a martini at New York’s Algonquin Hotel bar (once Dorothy Parker’s home from home), and brothel madam Cynthia Payne (otherwise known as Madam Cyn) giving a neatly moustachioed, manacled gent in a bra and a pair of very high heels a bit of a seeing-too with a cane, at one of the sex parties Payne organised at her London home.
Both artists are good at minor details: with Tom of Finland it is zippers, biker jacket insignias, motorcycles, the sheen of leather, bulging crotches, puckered assholes and tumescent cocks. Cook does good eyebrows and sniggers, a cup of tea and a sausage sandwich, big fat cigarettes, platform heels and sensible shoes, all the accoutrements of the everyday that give her work flavour. Tom of Finland does smouldering looks and a boot pressing down hard on a man’s groin, while Cook does girls’ nights out (all dressed up as Lyons Corner House waitresses), alarmingly fluorescent eyeshadow, a male stripper and lugubrious, affable blokes downing pints. Tom of Finland salutes the improbably muscled and engorged, and nipples that have seen a lot of work, while Cook celebrates people – mostly, but not always women – who do not care to watch their weight. They’re all too busy having a giggle and an ogle and another little drinkie. Everyone in these paintings and drawings is comfortable in their skins, though some of Tom’s yearn to get even more comfortable inside someone else’s.
This is a small show, but I wouldn’t want more. The artists are minor but good fun, and both say something about the social mores of the very different worlds they inhabited, which overlap only slightly. Cook remains an enduring fixture in British popular, largely working-class culture, while Tom of Finland’s significance went beyond being a commentator or a recorder of a queer subculture. He helped shape that culture’s codes, its look and behaviour. His early work often features construction workers, a rumpus in a logging camp, cops and prisoners in a jail. Both artists, in their very different ways, wanted to give pleasure and to show us things (though I rather doubt if Tom of Finland cared about an audience outside the international community he inhabited) and ways of being we might otherwise not have noticed. Neither liked moral hypocrisy. Tom of Finland wanted to get his viewers horny, and Beryl Cook wanted to make us laugh. On my way out I didn’t know whether to find some friendly, raucous pub somewhere, or a quiet corner where I could do myself a mischief. Perhaps both. Everything’s possible.
