Itella Posti Oy will release the Tom of Finland stamp sheet on Monday, September 8. The stamps have been the talk of the town both in Finland and internationally. The sheet has been available for preorder from Posti’s online shop since April. The stamps have raised immense interest and, therefore, stamp buyers should act quickly before the edition is sold out. Additionally, a Tom of Finland gift set will become available in Posti outlets and Posti’s online shop, including three postcards as well as the stamp sheet.
This fall’s other stamp releases exhibit nostalgic yard and garden scenes based on Urpo Martikainen’s watercolors as well as playful and modifiable signs of the sky.
Reforming the icons of gay culture
Tom of Finland’s masculine homoerotic drawings have attained iconic status in their genre. The artist renewed the imagery of gay culture by expanding the previous feminine gay imagery with his muscular and masculine men. Tom of Finland’s works resort to self-irony, exaggeration and humor.
During his career, Tom of Finland produced more than 3,500 drawings. The two drawings from 1978 and 1979 selected for the stamp sheet represent strong and confident male figures typical of Tom of Finland. “It was interesting to dive into Tom’s exceptionally lusty, masculine and black-and-white graphic world,” explains Timo Berry, the designer responsible for the design of the stamps.
Sensation in the philatelic world
Tom of Finland stamps have raised global interest in the media, in online publications and in social media like no other stamps in the world. Itella has received mainly positive feedback regarding the stamps, and their release has been generally seen as an open-minded and brave act, but the homoerotic nature of the stamps has also been frowned upon.
Seta – LGBTI Rights in Finland, who promotes sexual equality in Finland, granted Itella the Apple of Good Information honorable mention for the Tom of Finland stamps in June 2014. According to Seta, releasing the stamps is a significant cultural achievement and an example of how a company can positively use the ideas of sexual orientation diversity in its business operations.
Letters collected for the exhibit tell the story of the man behind the pseudonym
Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991) started his artistic journey as Tom of Finland already in the 1950s when his homoerotic drawings were published abroad in genre magazines. Before a full-time career as an artist, the multi-talented Laaksonen was a soldier in the Finnish Continuation War, a restaurant musician, an accompanist, and an advertisement drawer. He became a free artist in 1973 after receiving recognition in exhibitions around the world.
Touko Laaksonen’s (1920-1991) profile is extended in the exhibition Sealed with a Secret – Correspondence of Tom of Finland opening in the Postal Museum on September 6. The exhibition will display the busy correspondence of Laaksonen from the early 1940s to his dying year, 1991. The exhibition will be displayed until March 29, 2015, in Tampere’s Museum Centre Vapriikki in the new Postal Museum.