 | This article's lead section may be too short to adequately summarize the key points.(September 2021) |
The Tom of Finland stamps are a 2014 issue of three Finnish first-class stamps drawn by and celebrating the work of Finnish artist Tom of Finland (born Touko Laaksonen).
The stamps were announced by the Finnish postal service Itella Posti Oy in April 2014 and were released on September 8. [1] [2] They are considered to be the world's first depicting homoerotic art. [3]
According to the Tom of Finland Foundation (TFF), selection of the images for the stamps was coordinated by Solja Järvenpää of Arts Promotion Centre Finland, Susanna Luoto and Durk Dehner of TFF, and Timo Berry of the Finnish design agency BOTH, who designed them. [2] [4]
Itella Posti Oy praised the artist's works as having attained iconic status in their genre and had an influence on, for instance, pop culture and fashion. [1] The new Finnish Postal Museum in Tampere opened with an exhibit of the artist's work and letter exchanges to coincide with the stamps' release. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9]
Art critic Estelle Lovatt said the stamps were a "great statement"; she and others including Mark Joseph Stern, writer of an LGBTQ blog at Slate , noted that Finland then had not yet legalized same-sex marriage. [3] [10] [11] In Finland, an online petition called for cancellation of the issue as "[neither] aesthetically beautiful [nor] culturally valuable", and the Christian-owned department store chain Halpa-Halli refused to stock them. [12] [13] The issue of the stamps ran parallel to public debate on legalisation of gay marriage in the same year; a bill for legalisation was approved by the Parliament on 12 December 2014. [14] [15]
The postage stamps are the work of Finnish designer Timo Berry and are based on drawings by Touko Laaksonen. As Berry and others pointed out, Tom of Finland's greatest significance is his penchant for strong gay masculinity. Previously homosexuals had been portrayed as foppish, weak or girlish. Laaksonen developed first elements of his style, including a hang for uniforms, during Finland's Continuation War (1941–1944) when German troops were stationed in Helsinki. [16] The issue is a miniature sheet consisting of three first-class self-adhesive stamps: [17] two depict sections of a drawing of a nude man sitting between the legs of another man dressed as a police officer and with a cigarette in his mouth; the other depicts a nude backside with a man's face peering between the two legs. [3] [5] [6]
The Finnish postal service reported a record amount of interest in the stamp issue, including pre-orders from 178 countries. [7] [18] Itella planned to produce 200,000 sheets and allows for online orders by overseas buyers. [19] The German Tagesspiegel called the series a Kassenschlager, a world-wide box office success. [20] Most orders came from Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. [8] Seth Millstein wrote in Bustle : "The designs aren't quite explicit, but they're worlds more graphic than anything that's ever appeared on a U.S. postage stamp." [5] A writer in the Washington Post called them "pretty risque". [21] A first-day set of the stamps was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as a "significant addition to objects of LGBTQ culture in the collection". [12]
Vitaly Milonov, an anti-gay Russian politician then on the Saint Petersburg council, called for the stamps to be banned in Russia and for Finns to voluntarily refrain from using them on post to Russia. [11] [22] [23]
According to Dean Shepherd, editor of Gibbons Stamp Monthly , they are probably the first stamps with erotic art of any kind. [24] However, according to Markku Penttinen, development manager with Finland's postal services, as early as the 1950s Finnish stamps showed naked women in the sauna. [25] Both male and female nudity appeared on stamps already in the 19th century. The 1930 Spanish stamps depicting Goya's Naked Maja constituted the first open image of the body of a human woman (as opposed to a Greek goddess) with pubic hair on a stamp and led to scandal then. [26]
NZ Post, shortened from New Zealand Post, is a state-owned enterprise responsible for providing postal service in New Zealand.
Postal service in the United States began with the delivery of stampless letters whose cost was borne by the receiving person, later encompassed pre-paid letters carried by private mail carriers and provisional post offices, and culminated in a system of universal prepayment that required all letters to bear nationally issued adhesive postage stamps.
Touko Valio Laaksonen, best known by his pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist known for his stylized highly masculinized homoerotic art, and for his influence on late 20th-century gay culture. He has been called the "most influential creator of gay pornographic images" by cultural historian Joseph W. Slade. 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.
Same-sex marriage in Finland has been legal since 1 March 2017. A bill for the legalisation of same-sex marriages was approved by the Finnish Parliament in a vote of 101–90 on 12 December 2014 and signed into law by President Sauli Niinistö on 20 February 2015. Further legislation to harmonise other laws with the legalisation of same-sex marriage was passed in 2016. The law took effect on 1 March 2017. Finland was the last Nordic sovereign state to legalise same-sex marriage, the 13th country in Europe overall, and the 21st worldwide.
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Erotic comics are adult comics which focus substantially on nudity and sexual activity, either for their own sake or as a major story element. As such they are usually not permitted to be sold to legal minors. Like other genres of comics, they can consist of single panels, short comic strips, comic books, or graphic novels/albums. Although never a mainstream genre, they have existed as a niche alongside – but usually separate from – other genres of comics.
Finland has produced postage stamps for use since 1856.
The postal history of Malta began in the early modern period, when pre-adhesive mail was delivered to foreign destinations by privately owned ships for a fee. The earliest known letter from Malta, sent during the rule of the Order of St John, is dated 1532. The first formal postal service on the islands was established by the Order in 1708, with the post office being located at the Casa del Commun Tesoro in Valletta. The first postal markings on mail appeared later on in the 18th century.
Daddy and the Muscle Academy is a 1991 Finnish documentary film directed and written by Ilppo Pohjola. The documentary is focused on the life and works of Tom of Finland, the pseudonym of Finnish gay erotic artist Touko Laaksonen.
This is a survey of the postage stamps and postal history of Estonia. The stamps of Estonia are issued by the postal administration Eesti Post which is the country's only provider of universal postal services.
Sadao Hasegawa was a Japanese graphic artist known for creating homoerotic fetish art. His works are noted for their extensive detail, elaborate fantasy settings, and for their juxtaposition of elements from Japanese, Balinese, Thai, Tibetan Buddhist, African, and Indian art. While Hasegawa focused primarily on depictions of muscular male physique, he often incorporated extreme sexual themes in his works, including bondage and sadomasochism. His art is noted for strong mystical and spiritual overtones.
This is a survey of the postage stamps and postal history of Åland.
Territories of the United States on stamps discusses commemorative postal issues devoted to lands that have been ceded to the nation or purchased by treaty in conjunction with both war and peace. Thirteen states have been created from colonial territories, two from independent republics, four from previous states in the Union, and an additional thirty-one from United States territories.
Tom of Finland is a 2017 biographical drama film directed by Dome Karukoski and written by Aleksi Bardy. It stars Pekka Strang as Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland, a Finnish homoerotic artist.
Durk Dehner is a businessman, film director, and publisher who co-founded the culturally influential Tom of Finland Company, and later established the Tom of Finland Foundation dedicated to preserving, collecting, and exhibiting homoerotic art, a registered historic landmark in Los Angeles, California.
Michael Kirwan was an American artist, known for his distinctively stylized erotic illustrations and comics, published in more than 600 magazines. Although he focused primarily on homoerotic themes, he also produced substantial work for the heterosexual and fetish markets. He worked primarily in Prismacolor markers and permanent ink.
Tsuyoshi Yoshida, known by the pen name Go Mishima, was a Japanese homoerotic fetish artist and founder of the magazine Sabu. He is noted for his illustrations of "macho-type" men, often with yakuza-inspired irezumi tattoos. Mishima, along with Tatsuji Okawa, Sanshi Funayama, and Go Hirano, is regarded by artist and historian Gengoroh Tagame as a central figure in the first wave of contemporary gay artists in Japan.
Kake is a fictional character created by Tom of Finland, the pseudonym of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen. The character is 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. He is among Laaksonen's most popular creations, and is noted for his influence on gay leather subculture.
