A Horny Winter’s Night With the Tom of Finland Crowd

The vibe of the night was, in a word, horny: As they arrived in the main room, guests were greeted by a life-sized bronze nude sculpture (which had been dressed in a harness just for the event), and a gigantic leather-boot-shaped cake by the New York baker Yip.Studio. In a festive touch, bondage-themed wreaths—crafted by Apparatus’s founder and creative director Gabriel Hendifar—hung from the room’s walls. (It was only once I saw the boot cake and belted wreaths side by side that it occurred to me that the booted-and-belted Santa Claus might have a sort of Tom of Finland thing going on, but that’s a topic for another time.) This event, according to chief curator Brooke Wise, was intended to “reframe Tom of Finland’s legacy for the present moment, honoring its roots and positioning it within a contemporary cultural and aesthetic conversation.”

Eventually, I made my way through the room to marvel at Tom’s iconic homoerotic drawings up close: detailed depictions of ultra-ripped bikers, policemen, soldiers, and manly men of all sorts, all impressively well-endowed, muscles bulging, feeling and fucking each other for all to see. As I began speaking to guests taking in the work, I was curious to hear how their own encounters with Tom of Finland shaped their experiences as gay men, and their own relationships to masculinity, especially since we at GQ have spent so much time this year considering what makes a “modern man.”

Many men I spoke to at the party agreed that Tom’s hypermasculine homoeroticism expanded their view of what their own queerness could look like: “Typically, gayness is depicted as quite effeminate,” said artist Ricardo Johnson, “but this form of masculinity [in Tom’s art] is typically depicted as straight, and so to see it in a way that is succinctly queer, I think has a certain level of power, because it shows what the multiplicity of queerness is.”

Another guest shared a similar sentiment: “I think when you grow up as a gay man, you learn to stay under the radar and not make waves, and steer conversations away from certain topics,” he told me. “And when I saw the Tom of Finland imagery as a young gay boy, it was a representation of, you can be gay and still be a powerful man.”