Exhibition continues until Saturday 19 October. Open 12 to 6 pm, Wednesday to Saturday, with extended hours of 10 am to 6 pm on 10-13 October for The Lakes International Comic Art Festival. Kake ( / ˈ k ɑː k ɛ/ KAH-keh; Finnish pronunciation: [ˈkɑke]) [1] is a fictional character created by Tom of Finland, the pseudonym of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen. A gay leatherman distinguished by his hypermasculine physical characteristics and his frequent sexual encounters, Kake appears as the title character of a 26-issue erotic comic book series published by Laaksonen from 1968 to 1986.

Tom of Finland Eight Artists on the Influence of Tom of Finland

There is considerable argument over whether his depiction of "supermen" (male characters with huge sexual organs and muscles) is facile and distasteful, or whether there is a deeper complexity in the work which plays with and subverts those stereotypes. For example, some critics have noted instances of apparent tenderness between traditionally tough, masculine characters, or playful smiles in sado-masochistic scenes. [ citation needed] Hooven, F. Valentine III (2012). Tom of Finland: Life and Work of a Gay Hero. Berlin: Bruno Gmünder Verlag. ISBN 978-3-86787-166-2. As a longtime Angeleno and definitely someone who has been a part of a larger queer leather community here, I know how important Tom of Finland was in terms of brotherhood. So even though it wasn’t necessarily for me, Tom’s house always provided an amazing community resource. But for me as a dyke, I could not find myself in Tom of Finland’s work beyond drag. In either case, there remains a large constituency who admire the work on a purely utilitarian basis; as described by Rob Meijer, owner of a leathershop and art gallery in Amsterdam, "These works are not conversation pieces, they're masturbation pieces." [ citation needed]The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts, Claude J. Summers, Cleis Press, 2004. ISBN 1-57344-191-0 He went to school in Turku and in 1939, at the age of 19, he moved to Helsinki to study advertising. In his spare time he also started drawing erotic images for his own pleasure, [3] based on images of male laborers he had seen from an early age. At first he kept these drawings hidden, but then destroyed them "at least by the time I went to serve the army." [5] The country became embroiled in the Winter War with the USSR, and then became formally involved in World War II, and he was conscripted in February 1940 into the Finnish Army. [3] He served as an anti-aircraft officer, holding the rank of second lieutenant. [6] He later attributed his fetishistic interest in uniformed men to encounters with men in army uniform, especially soldiers of the German Wehrmacht serving in Finland at that time. "In my drawings I have no political statements to make, no ideology. I am thinking only about the picture itself. The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course I drew them anyway—they had the sexiest uniforms!" [7] After the war, in 1945, he returned to studies. [3] Ramakers, Mischa. Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland, Masculinity and Homosexuality. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. ISBN 0-312-20526-0 Millstein, Seth (15 April 2014). "Finland's Homoerotic Postage Stamps Are Pretty Bold". Bustle . Retrieved 19 August 2015.

Tom of Finland - Artist - David Kordansky Gallery Tom of Finland - Artist - David Kordansky Gallery

Touko Valio Laaksonen (8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991), known by the pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and influenced late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. [2] Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing. To learn more about Tom of Finland, please view this lecturehe delivered at CalArts in 1985 (at the invitation of Mike Kelley), as well as these articles from Artforum.com, Art in America, DazedDigital.com, Drummer, The Guardian, and Vice.com.FROM ADVERTISING TO GAY EROTICA: THE WORK OF TOM OF FINLAND". Tom of Finland Foundation. 15 June 2015 . Retrieved 28 March 2021. In 2015, Artists Space presented the exhibition "Tom of Finland: The Pleasure of Play" in New York City, USA. [38] The exhibition was also presented in Kunsthalle Helsinki in 2016, complemented with additional material such as photos from family albums. [39] Laaksonen's illustrations of leathermen, as exemplified by Kake, significantly influenced the aesthetics of the gay leather subculture. [6] Edward Lucie-Smith has noted that depictions of masculine gay men by Laaksonen "altered the way gay men think about themselves" and "began to elaborate an identity type, with dress and physical attributes" that countered stereotypes of gay men as weak and effeminate. [6] While the archetype of the masculine leatherman biker was well established in both gay and straight culture by the time of Kake's creation (notably in the 1953 film The Wild One starring Marlon Brando, which Laaksonen cites as a direct influence on his artwork), [5] F. Valentine Hooven III argues that "the leatherman as drawn by Tom of Finland" is "the gold standard, at least within the gay community." [1] Laaksonen was born on 8 May 1920 and raised by a middle-class family in Kaarina, a town in southwestern Finland, near the city of Turku. [3] Both of his parents Suoma and Edwin Laaksonen were schoolteachers at the grammar school that served Kaarina. The family lived in the school building's attached living quarters. [4] Kake has been described by Susanna Paasonen as Laaksonen's "most iconic character," [20] and by Hooven as "the gay world’s most familiar pin-up icon." [1] Editor Dian Hanson describes Kake as "a sort of Johnny Appleseed traveling the world on his motorcycle spreading the seeds of liberated, mutually satisfying, ecstatically explicit gay sex." [2] Hanson argues that the series was an expression of Laaksonen's desire to depict sex between men that was freed from internalized homophobia – Laaksonen himself stated that his goal for his art was to draw "proud men who were happy having sex" [2] – noting how characters in Kake "break the affection barrier" by kissing and caressing each other in addition to performing sexual acts, and that Laaksonen depicts Kake assuming both active and passive roles during sex. [12]