Michael Valinsky

A man has a look on his face that screams trouble. He wants something from you. He wants you to take your clothes off. He wants you naked. His clothes barely fit. They’re skin-tight and his thickly drawn muscles burst out of every opening. Even the shading is sexy. The man wears leather and, with hands much larger than his face, reaches over to touch you. It’s not like he wants to buy you a drink, he wants to be the drink. Outside the window, more men. Further away, more still. The streets are brimming with them, and beyond are rainbow-colored bars, and shops spilling out with dildos, cock rings, vibrators, and lubricants of all kinds. The testosterone is potent. You’re in a city not unlike all the others, except if you choose to look, it will look back at you.

Finnish artist Touko Valio Laaksonen (aka Tom of Finland) has fueled his practice with the very stuff of observations; to him, the city acts a playground of ever-hotter imagery. Eaten up by unrealized sexual fantasies for most of his early life, Tom of Finland put his imagination to the page, drawing pictures of a libidinal, homoerotic imaginary. Growing up, Tom lived in a heavily industrialized countryside. While his eyes poured over the muscular, sweating, laboring men of the land, his drawings revealed a perception of the male body highly inflected with the flavors of “hyper-masculinity—always a ‘superman.’” But it wasn’t until Stalin’s invasion of Finland that Tom was able to realize his projected fantasies with men whose bodies fit snuggly within the outlines of his heavily-shaded illustrations. They were burly. They were hairy. They were buff. They were manly as hell. They were everything he wanted.

From this desire, Tom of Finland developed a meticulous practice. He set out to create illustrations of men that would turn on, provoke, and lure his viewers. Men found a primal attraction and fascination for the kitschy, sexy, paradisiacal men Tom of Finland overtly depicted. His work suddenly made leather daddies and BDSM accessible. He took the artistic license to represent a world of explicit homoerotic desire, which, at the time, was taboo (and is still in some parts of the world). The men in the work are not typical. They’re not the men you’ll walk down the street and lock eyes with, or that you’ll spot at a bar casually. They’re a fantasy.

His success grew out of this edginess and, in the early 80s, after many successful gallery shows, Tom and his protégé Dirk Dehner moved to Los Angeles. There, they founded the Tom of Finland Foundation. A sanctuary for men who wanted to live out their fantasies freely, the “Tom House,” as it’s called, serves as a site for the exhibition, archiving and preservation of erotic art. The 1984 foundation is the subject of Wallpaper Magazine editor Michael Reynolds’ new book from Rizzoli. With an introduction by Mayer Rus, editor at Architectural Digest, this title captures the alluring and fantastic essence of the Tom House.

“Tucked behind a monumental Eugenia hedge on a street of modest bungalows and apartment houses,” Rus writes, [the Tom House] is one of the gay world’s most idiosyncratic and authentic historical sites.” The house’s setting unfolds into a vivid and tangible atmosphere, as Rus sets the scene: “Meanwhile, two guys engaged in light codpiece-on-codpiece frottage unexpectedly break out laughing… Across the way, a shirtless beefcake wearing a leather apron and a tattoo that reads ‘Tom of Finland’ across his well-muscled back is shaving the head of a fetching lad in a rickety barber chair.” Paging through the book, one discovers the various elements that make up Tom House: objects of fascination and kitsch, ever-present imagery of cocks-and-balls, leather, metal chains. It’s not just a place for the casual passerby, but rather, a welcoming one for the curious and the initiated, the local and the traveler, and for those who have made the pilgrimage to live and work in Tom’s legacy. In fact, to this day, it is a home to emerging artists and men from the community—a living history museum.

Foundations like this one, which are physical sites for preserving a living history, have been crucial centers for many artists whose practice falls outside of the mainstream. And current events have made spaces of safety necessary and crucial; spaces where our fetishes and libidinal cravings are welcomed with open arms, not attacked, and not killed. With this new presentation of Tom of Finland’s practice, Reynolds has truly brought to the surface the intimate nature of this community, and it’s remarkable.

Tom House: Tom of Finland in Los Angeles
Edited by Michael Reynolds | Written by Mayer Rus | Photography by Martyn Thompson
Rizzoli
Hardcover, 9780847848119, 256 pp.

To call novelist Grubisic’s latest work “your typical coming-of-age Rock’N’Roll story” would be selling it short. As readers, we are used to seeing recurring tropes in new adult texts: first love, a rule-breaking adventure, domestic upheaval, or existential crisis. However, they’re often written in comprehensible, syntactically coherent sentences, and plot driven texts. We nod and smile at the moments we recognize and frown at those we’ve pushed far into the depth of our memories. From Up River and for One Night Only is a linguistic brouhaha, lending itself to non-associative devices. These tropes are no longer intelligible; rather, they are bendable ideas that Grubisic populates with fragments, jarring syntax, unorthodox word association and with a myriad of different types of writing styles.

Dee, Gordyn, Em, and Jay are edgy high school students with a passion for music that only the creation of a band can satiate. Living in River Bend City these four teenagers are eager to get away–or at least to know what it feels like to have the option of leaving with prospects. College does not seem on the forefront of their mind, though exploring their sexuality is crucial and getting educated is paramount. They’d like their music to make an impact, to strike a chord in its auditors. Of course, the text doesn’t spell it out for us, in that it jumps back and forth from year to year (an effective destabilizing gesture). The author is headstrong about letting the words function autonomously on the page so as to mimic the hidden intentions of his characters within the reader.

At first, a traditional reader might find the text stressful, annoying, and even perhaps infuriating. There is hardly any entry point for a reader to get immersed in a plot. Rather, the reader must dive right into language (“The / Gor / gons”) in order to understand. In that sense, the book is rather participatory. We want to know what the characters are planning and what they mean, but we will have to do the work to grasp the extent of it in practice. The text is not quick in identifying its protagonists’ arc and spends more time creating a context for the characters to inhabit: “Behind their perch: a pair of scratched yellow backhoes with scoops half-raised, burdened with loads of gravel, and still as if frozen in mid-battle – a little visual gag from workmen who’d left for the weekend.” These contextualizing gestures remind us of landscape poets who are obsessed with the described landscape as a psychological space. In fact, readers are systematically reminded of where the action takes place, but are not given many clues as to what the action actually is.

The preparatory steps integral to the band’s trip to New York are effective in their linguistic construction. The readers witness the band spell out sounds, consider word choice, rhythm, and general sentence construction. The characters become their own first interpreters:

The basement’s scant lighting [….] encouraged them toward the gradual pleasure of
unselfconscious abandon [….] Letting loose surprised them [….] ’That was orgasmic. Again? Se says ‘disorientated,’ that’s not even a word [….] Should we change it?’

The characters intervene in the narrative and usurp authorial control. Moments like these make you stop to think. We also hear from each character, who takes control of the narrative and inject in it their own psyche.

Though at times indecipherable, Grubisic’s novel is an exciting exercise in language, and it does give its readers enough to hold onto, should they be ready for the ride. The story’s climax is a fantastic marriage of music and poetic prose, culminating in a final performance that leaves its readers, characters, and linguistic audience wanting more disjunction, confusion, and grunge.

From Up River and for One Night Only 
By Brett Josef Grubisic
Now or Never Publishing
Paperback, 9781988098074, 347 pages
April 2016