Tom of Finland

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.5 • 934 Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2026

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Subscribe to Extra Bad Gays on Apple Podcasts or Patreon to support our work, get monthly bonus episodes, and join our community of listeners! Live from Helsinki, we close out our season with Tom of Finland, the man who advertised the concept of gay masculinity to gays becoming men. Originally his illustrations were controversial because of his graphic depictions of gay sex, of sodomy and cocksucking and fisting in a pre-liberation, pre-internet age. Today, things have changed so much you can buy Tom branded products in department stores like Selfridges, and books of his drawings in Barnes and Noble. But at the same time, his representations of Black men and of Nazi aesthetics have drawn new criticisms, even while the fisting and piss and cock-sucking have become perfect home decorations. And the influence of his work on gay male sex cultures, on ideals of queer masculinities, and especially on leather scenes, remains enormous and contested. ----more---- SOURCES: F. Valentine Hooven III, Tom Of Finland: His Life And Times (St. Martin's, 1992) Arnie Kantrowitz, Swastika Toys, in Leatherfolk, edited by Mark Thompson, pp. 193–209. Hunter Scott, “Facing Sameness: Reconsidering the Radicality of Tom of Finland.” InVisible Culture 36, https://doi.org/10.47761/494a02f6.262a8f58. Carta Monir, "Morally Erect," Lux Magazine, https://lux-magazine.com/article/tom-of-finland/ https://worldcrunch.com/in-the-news/tom-of-finland-double-life-of-the-gay-icon-who-changed-a-nation/ https://www.myhelsinki.fi/visit/lgbtqia-in-helsinki/tom-of-finlands-helsinki/ https://kunstkritikk.com/the-cult-of-iconified-homosexuality/ Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to season 9, episode 10 of Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated
0:25.1	queer people in history.
0:26.3	I'm Ben Miller, a writer, historian, and member of the board of the Shulhas, Zazam in Berlin.
0:31.1	And I'm Hulam, a writer and author.
0:33.1	And we are so happy tonight to be recording live from Helsinki, Finland.
0:39.3	You'll hear our wonderful audience in the background.
0:41.8	We've encouraged them to make some noise.
0:44.3	And you'll also get to hear some questions from them at the end.
0:48.0	So, who are we talking about to close out our thing than you?
0:51.3	As always, I'd like to start with a bit of a story.
0:53.9	So a number of years ago, I was on a road
0:55.4	trip driving through the American South, and it was a real road movie style expedition, expedition,
1:01.6	in this sort of bust-up old Jeep Cherokee we'd borrowed from my boyfriend's brother-in-law,
1:06.1	and we drove up Route 75 through the center of Florida and ending up going through making Georgia past these
1:12.9	roadside billboards that were advertising everything from vasectomies to Jesus Christ, guns
1:17.7	and ammo to Florida oranges and Georgia peaches.
1:21.4	As a foreigner visiting the US, you often get this strange, sensationally uncanny.
1:25.5	These are representations of places and lives you've seen all your life in the American movies and TV shows that have permeated Europe,
1:32.3	or at least Western European visual culture since the end of World War II. But here it is, and it actually looks like that, a film set.
1:39.3	I remember visiting New York in my early 20s and thinking, wow, it looks like New York.
1:45.0	So that evening we got into Atlanta, Georgia, and we wanted a beer, so we went to this little bar called Friends,
1:51.0	which was a gay bar lined with chipboard walls and pool tables and neon lights, and it was above a tattoo parlor in a strip mall.
	...

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