Reappropriations and Criticism of Finnishness in Tom of Finland, the Film and the Musical

Introduction

The year 2017 was celebrated in Finland as the centennial year of Finnish independence. A variety of different cultural projects were commissioned to commemorate this event. Two of these, a film and a musical, were made about Tom of Finland, the alias used by Touko Laaksonen (1920–1991), a prolific artist who produced hundreds of works of homoerotic art. Laaksonen, alias Tom, came to symbolize mainstream acceptance of gay culture in Finland from the early 1990s onward (see Nykänen 1996, 143). In this article, I will discuss both of these cultural artifacts, the film and the musical, and argue how each of these, in their own way, broadened existing ideas of Finnishness by incorporating the history of sexual minorities as part of the larger narrative of the nation, but also how both rewrite and, at times, queer mainstream notions of Finnishness.¹

Compared to other Nordic countries, Finland's relationship toward its LGBT minorities has been more troubled. While Sweden, Den-mark, and Iceland, for example, witnessed the discussion of gay rights already in the 1930s, efforts to initiate similar discussions in Finland were quashed under the weight of pressing political concerns. After the civil war of 1918, the rift between communists and extreme right-wing politics in the 1930s left little room for the discussion of gay rights. When World War II began, Finland sided with Nazi Germany, and due to the close connections between German and Finnish scientists, Freud's and Krafft-Ebing's views on homosexuality as a paraphilia transformed in the Nazi ideology to homosexuality being viewed as a disease, and this attitude spread also to Finland. (See Hagman 2016, 222–3.) Even though World War II allowed the highly moralistic and normative sexual culture to transform into a relatively permissive yet still inhibited sexual culture (see the section in this article on the musical's tango scene), the backlash of 1950s postwar sexual politics is depicted in both of the instances discussed here as a dangerous time for Finnish gay minorities. Gay subcultures were sporadically discussed in public throughout Finnish history from the 1950s and 1960s onward, a time when gay subcultures were forming in urban surroundings. Historically, in the agrarian context, homosexuality was not seen as posing a threat to heterosexual masculinities; only in the urban context did it become something that heterosexual majorities started to think of as othered, perverted, and dangerous. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, public opinion was turning from pathologizing to accepting discourses on homosexuality. (See Löfström 1999, 11–3, 16–9; Melanko 2012, 14; Mustola 2007a.)

My goal in this discussion is to produce history-sensitive close readings (Bal 2002; Richardson 2016) of the film Tom of Finland (2017, dir. Dome Karukoski) and the musical Tom of Finland, The Musical (2017, dir. Reija Wäre) that attend to issues arising from writing on Finnishness and nationality (Anderson 1983; Billig 1995; Markkola, Östman, and Lamberg 2014; Lehtonen, Löytty, and Ruuska 2015); gay sexualities and queer studies (Dyer 1992; Halperin 2012; Juvonen 2002; Kekki 2000; 2010; Kalha 2001); and critical masculinity studies (Markkola, Östman, and Lamberg 2014; Kekki 2010; Kalha 2012). These critical themes are deployed in the context of readings that draw on approaches from film music studies and research on popular music (Richardson 2012; Pääkkölä 2016) that address the relationship of music and sound to cultural formations. Because of this orientation, I would align my work more closely with cultural studies than historical research, even though historical considerations are also unavoidably present in my discussions. My aim is to produce readings of the film and musical that describe how they participate in ongoing discussions about Finnishness in their cultural context, and how they participate in rewriting Finnish history. The concept of "homonationality" (Puar 2007; 2013) is of use in this task, although some of the term's applicability to Finnish homosexual culture and my source materials is limited. Two of the central questions I am seeking answers to include the following: Which traits of Finnishness...