 | 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 stamp 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]
An international reply coupon (IRC) is a coupon that can be exchanged for one or more postage stamps representing the minimum postage for an unregistered priority airmail letter sent to another Universal Postal Union (UPU) member country. IRCs are accepted by all UPU member countries.
Touko Valio Laaksonen, 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. Over the course of four decades, he produced some 3,500 illustrations, mostly featuring men with exaggerated sex traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing.
Posti Group Oyj, trading internationally as Posti Group Corporation, is the main Finnish postal service delivering mail and parcels in Finland. The State of Finland is the sole shareholder of the company. Posti has a universal service obligation that entails weekday deliveries of letters in all of Finland's municipalities. Posti's head office is located in Pohjois-Pasila in Helsinki. Posti's history spans nearly 400 years.
Freepost is a postal service provided by various postal administrations, whereby a person sends mail without affixing postage, and the recipient pays the postage when collecting the mail. Freepost differs from self-addressed stamped envelopes, courtesy reply mail, and metered reply mail in that the recipient of the freepost pays only for those items that are actually received, rather than for all that are distributed. Freepost of preprinted cards issued by businesses is also different from postal stationery sold by postal administrations.
Karelia has appeared in philately several times; first as a breakaway republic from Soviet Russia in 1922, later when Eastern Karelia was occupied by Finland during the Continuation War of 1941 to 1944, and in the post-Soviet period when provisional stamps and cinderellas were issued. Additionally, there were Zemstvo stamps used in the early 20th century on the territory of the contemporary Republic of Karelia.
The Europa postage stamp is an annual joint issue of stamps with a common design or theme by postal administrations of member countries of the European Communities (1956–1959), the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) from 1960 to 1992, and the PostEurop Association since 1993. Europe is the central theme.
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.
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.
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.
This is a survey of the postage stamps and postal history of South Korea.
Finnish art started to form its individual characteristics in the 19th century, when romantic nationalism began to rise in the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland.
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.
Bill Schmeling, better known by his pen name The Hun, was an American artist active in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, known for his explicit, homoerotic fetish illustrations and comics.
Domingo Francisco Juan Esteban "Dom" Orejudos, Secundo, also widely known by the pen names Etienne and Stephen, was an openly gay artist, ballet dancer, and choreographer, best known for his ground-breaking gay male erotica beginning in the 1950s. Along with artists George Quaintance and Touko Laaksonen —with whom he became friends—Orejudos' leather-themed art promoted an image of gay men as strong and masculine, as an alternative to the then-dominant stereotype as weak and effeminate. With his first lover and business partner Chuck Renslow, Orejudos established many landmarks of late-20th-century gay male culture, including the Gold Coast bar, Man's Country bathhouse, the International Mr. Leather competition, Chicago's August White Party, and the magazines Triumph, Rawhide, and Mars. He was also active and influential in the Chicago ballet community.
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, US.
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.
Physique Pictorial is an American magazine, one of the leading beefcake magazines of the mid-20th century. During its run from 1951 to 1990 as a quarterly publication, it exemplified the use of bodybuilding culture and classical art figure posing, as a cover for homoerotic male images, and to evade charges of obscenity.
Kake 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.
