MOVIE REVIEW : Celebrating a Pioneer of Positive Gay Images

For decades the late artist Tom of Finland, who died last year at 71, has been a gay icon, celebrated for his images of macho fantasy figures. Ilppo Pohjala’s stylish, serious documentary “Daddy and the Muscle Academy” (at the Nuart) reveals not only the significance of Tom within the gay community but also his influence on popular culture at large.

Pohjala makes the case conclusively that the impact of Tom’s comic strips, populated exclusively with incredibly handsome and muscular young men, goes beyond the erotic. Tom’s men typically wear the uniforms of gay fantasy--the attire of cowboys, construction workers, servicemen and policemen and, above all, leathermen. Yet these figures of power and super-masculinity invariably display warmth, tenderness and even humor--eye contact between his men was of paramount importance to the artist. In Tom’s cartoons, sex is never degrading and always pleasurable for one and all.

Throughout the documentary Tom’s colleagues and admirers express their gratitude for his having provided such pioneering positive gay images--images that were to send legions of young gay men to the gym.

Tom of Finland’s greatest accomplishment was to dare to portray gays as masculine as any straight man; interestingly, he initially depicted gays as uniformly effeminate conforming to society’s stereotypes. Indeed, one of the film’s commentators goes so far as to assign Tom a major role in demolishing the notion that gays constituted a kind of “third sex,” lost in a limbo somewhere between the masculine and feminine genders.

Who was Tom of Finland anyway? We don’t learn his real name, even now, and not many facts. (An old photo shows him with a woman and two children, suggesting that he had been a husband and a father.) He was an apparently successful Finnish advertising man whose gay art was a sideline until 1973. His international career as Tom of Finland commenced when he started submitting work to the late Bob Mizer’s “Physique Pictorial,” whose photos of near-naked young men served as the inspirations for some of Tom’s earlier work.

‘Daddy and the Muscle Academy’

A Zeitgeist Films release of a Filmitakomo production, supported by AVEK/the Finnish Film Foundation/Tom of Finland Foundation/YLE TV 2. Writer-director Ilppo Pohjala. Producers Kari Paljakka, Alvaro Pardo. Cinematographer Kjell Lagerroos. Editor Jorma Hori. Music Elliot Sharp. Sound Pekka Karjalainen, Kauko Lindfors. Running time: 55 minutes.

Times-rated Mature (for some nudity and drawings depicting sexual activity).