text: Touko Laaksonen, an artist who worked under the pseudonym, Tom of Finland, lived in Helsinki in the middle of the 20th Century, in a society where his sexuality, and the erotic art work he created as an expression of his sexuality, were illicit. Indeed, it was a society in which gay men, and presumably women, were persecuted, often with violence, stigmatized, and pathologized.
  Tom of Finland, the biopic about Laaksonen’s life – he lived between 1920 and 1991 – dramatizes the ways in which the Finnish community forced its gay citizens into the shadows, particularly in the years after the end of World War II. The story glides through decades of Laaksonen’s adult life, culminating in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, but its emphasis, and its most moving sections, is upon his experience in World War II and his life in post-war Helsinki.
  Homosexuality was illegal in Finland during those years – it remained a crime until 1971, and its “promotion” (through art or otherwise) was illegal until 1999. Romantic or sexual connections between gay men were limited to furtive glances, to bathroom stalls and secluded public parks which were frequently raided by the police, who subdued and often beat and arrested the men they managed to capture, at least when the same police were not participating in their “crimes.”
  After the war, in addition to producing a corpus of homoerotic art which, at the time, was illegal to purvey in Finland, Laaksonen tried to form relationships with other men. He persevered, but his efforts often were foiled. In one episode of the film, Laaksonen puts together postcard-sized examples of his erotic art work and uses them as calling cards. In the bathroom of a nightclub, he slips one between toilet stalls, where he is being set up by a patron who has pretended to be interested in him. Laaksonen ends up beaten and expelled from the club. In another episode, during a trip to Berlin, his identification papers and his work are stolen and he is arrested, only to be rescued by a Finnish official, a married, but closeted gay man who befriended him during the war. While under arrest, a disgusted German police officer grimly reminds him that during the war, people “like him” were sent to the concentration camps.
  During the post-war period, Laaaksonen lived in Helsinki with his sister, who helped him find a job in an international commercial advertising agency, McCann-Erickson. His sister was a sympathetic person, but she had not overcome the pervasive national homophobia. She loved her brother, and she hoped that he would find a girlfriend. In one telling scene in the film, at a party, she presses him into a game of spin the bottle, and eggs him on to kiss one of the women in the circle. Laaksonen, the good (closeted) brother, complies. He later lived openly with a male lover, Veli, who was a dancer. Their relationship ultimately was accepted by his sister, and it lasted many years, until Veli’s death.