About Tom of Finland
Touko Valio Laaksonen (8 May 1920 – 7 November 1991), known by his pseudonym Tom of Finland, was a Finnish artist who made stylized erotic art featuring suggestively hypermasculine male characters. He worked primarily in pencil, producing drawings on paper and for publication in a variety of magazines and other formats. These works profoundly influenced late 20th-century gay culture and sexuality, their rise in popularity coinciding with gay law reform successes and the cultural and political emergence of LGBTQ+ communities from the 1960s onward. Tom of Finland 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 sexual traits, wearing tight or partially removed clothing. In 1984, he founded the Tom of Finland Foundation to preserve his catalogue of works and support erotic art generally; it continues to operate from TOM House in Los Angeles. == Early life == Laaksonen was born on 8 May 1920 and raised by a middle-class family in Kaarina, a town in southwestern Finland, near the city of Turku. Both of his parents Suoma and Edwin Laaksonen were schoolteachers at the grammar school that served Kaarina. The family lived in the school building's attached living quarters. He went to school in Turku and in 1939, at the age of 19, he moved to Helsinki to study advertising.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.