Tom’s Queers
Tom of Finland Arts & Culture Festival, Los Angeles, CA 2022
Tom of Finland Arts & Culture Festival, Los Angeles, CA 2022
Tom’s Queers
By Tucker Neel
This exhibition brings together works by six queer artists as a celebratory component of the 27th Tom of Finland Arts & Culture Festival in Los Angeles, CA. These artists’ respective practices critically engage meaningful aspects of Tom of Finland’s impactful legacy through works that expand what it means to be a queer artist working in and amongst ‘Tom’s Men’ in the 21st century. Their work does not necessarily look like Tom’s, and some pieces do not explicitly display erotic imagery at all. Instead, the heterogenous artworks and varied practices in this exhibition are a testament to the expansiveness of Tom’s enduring legacy.
The artists in Tom’s Queers do not directly quote or appropriate Tom’s work; they rhyme with it. What all the works in this show share with Tom’s is they encourage one to indulge in imaginative possibilities, project moments of pleasure into an ever hostile world. Every artist in this exhibition appreciates, values, and even loves Tom’s work. They all acknowledge that he was one of many innovative queer artists who paved the way for alternative, surprising, and often challenging works to come. S.R. Sharp from The Tom of Finland Foundation puts it best: “[Tom’s] creations, ‘Tom’s Men,’ broadened global society’s definition of what a queer could be. He gave us permission to be. And influenced artists that stood on his shoulders, with what they would see.”1 This show hopes to explore the ties that link the present to the past, artist to artist, intending to propose multiple queer ways of seeing. Along the way, we can locate critical junctures that ultimately expand the definition of what it means to be a ‘Tom’s Man,’ opening fruitful, flamboyant, and inclusive spaces where one can be both Tom’s Man and Tom’s Queer.
Judie Bamber’s work explores the act of looking, asking questions about how verisimilitude activates associative possibilities. In this exhibition, we are presented with two of Bamber’s works that look different yet share a common bond grounded in the power of sustained looking. Rendered in soft veils of graphite, the central subject in How do I Look? (Small Dildo) floats in a void of space, its standing position delimited by a faint outline, a reflection, as if it were sitting on glass.
Jack Halberstam discusses Bamber’s work saying, “Bamber’s extreme realism…serves to denaturalize the object of the gaze through intense scrutiny.”2 I would add that this denaturalization, this making strange, hinges on the artist’s ability to create an image that exceeds the objectness of its subject. The dildo on the page is more real than real. Something is enticing, even sexy, about this kind of visual mimicry, particularly when it comes to an object embedded with sexual meanings.
I’m reminded here of Tom’s deployment of technical skill, the way his ever-so-lightly layered pencil marks blend to render bodies that, in their dimensionality, seem to transcend the page that confines them, falling off into our laps. Like Bamber, Tom uses extreme realism, but in service of exaggerated form, denaturalizing not the image depicted — the men on the page — but the very idea of a natural male body as it exists in reality. In a world populated by Tom’s Men, ‘normal’ bodies look strange and out of place.
Additionally, Bamber’s choice of framing, setting her subject in a vast void, amplifies its strangeness. Halberstam characterizes this compositional choice by noting, “The deployment of scale…makes relevance relational and contingent but also turns the still life into something queer, into a limit, a repudiation of duration, longevity, versatility.”3 Now freed from rigid signification, the still life can work a kind of magic, can unlock a chain of free association. When I first encountered this piece, even though I knew it was an image of a dildo, I could not help but see an open tube of lipstick. My next thought was how much it looked like a bullet. These misapprehensions are not accidental. Lipstick, a bullet, and a dildo all share intimate relations to the body; they enter and exit it, causing dramatically different sensations of attraction, pain, and pleasure.
Bamber knows what she is doing. The title How do I Look (Small Dildo) refers not just to the way the drawing speaks of itself — a cheeky question asked to the viewer — it also compels the viewer to ask the question of themself. Really, how does one look? It is a question that needs to be asked more often than not when assigning meaning to things in the world.
Bamber’s Marble Woman also asks us to question the experience of meaning-making. The image is a silver pencil rendering of a photograph Bamber took of two book-matched slices of marble on the exterior cladding of The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The image is similar to a Rorschach ink blot, which purports to reveal the psychological inner workings of a subject by teasing out interpretive tendencies. Here, via the work’s title, Bamber tells us she sees a woman in the image, and we might see one too. But the work doesn’t end there. Upon further analysis, Bamber’s Marble Woman goes beyond being about a singular moment of apophenia, the human tendency to perceive meaningful connections in unrelated, random phenomena.
It’s important that Marble Woman is a drawing of a photograph and not the photograph itself. As Roland Barthes observed, we are more likely to accept a photograph as a record, whereas “drawing itself constitutes a connotation” which is forever suspect as a projection of the artist’s inevitable inability to overcome interpretive exaggerations.4 Given this understanding, with Marble Woman we are faced with an image that is both evidence and interpretation. Because of its photorealism and associations with Bamber’s long-standing practice of reproducing an image with as much accuracy as possible, we assume Marble Woman is an honest copy of its photographic referent.
Nevertheless, because the image immediately signs to Rorschachian analysis, we can’t help but consider the slippages in replication that are present. These slippages are not ‘mistakes’ but reflections of the artist’s psychological interiority. In this respect, Marble Woman denaturalizes psychological association, creates a remove to think about thinking about how we ascribe meaning to unsettled images.
Pacifico Silano’s practice also engages in the search for hidden meaning by traversing the overlooked margins of sexually-charged imagery, namely gay porn from the 1960s and 70s. The artist mines this archive not for overtly pornographic elements but the moments where the camera captures something else, something particular and peculiar. His is a search for pictorial adjacency. He finds these moments away from the central pornagraphic action, in a shadow cast against a wall, a gathering of dumbbells on a wooden floor, and a turned head reflected in a bathroom mirror. By looking elsewhere, Silano asks viewers to reconsider the expectations embedded in hyper-masculinized gay pornography. In the works in this exhibition, Silano’s subtle alterations of his source material provide a queer engagement with and critique of Tom’s iconic work and influential legacy.
The resulting oval image presents us with a truncated profile of a tanned mustachioed man emerging from one side of the rounded frame. He casts a shadow on a shower wall while another shadow from a figure just out of frame appears opposite him. There is no apparent contact between the two figures, but all the signs are there: this image captures the moments surrounding a sexual encounter. We know this not just because we know it is an image from a porno mag but also because we can sense the inherent eroticism embedded in the image; it maintains the residue of intended arousal.
She states, “In order to be erotic, the object must depend on the viewer, on the aroused one, on our fantasies, our imagination, our constructs, our framing, and yet, the object must also remain independent, still real, still other.”5 Silano’s image crops a fantasy and creates an object that maintains its distant otherness, allowing the pornographic to give way to the erotic.
. She does this by analyzing Roland Barthes’ concepts of punctum and studium illuminated in his book . Gallop notes, “If you think of the studium as a kind of enclosure, breaking it up (with the punctum) suggests breaking something open, allowing seepage.”6 Barthes then asserts this seepage leaves in its wake a “blind field” the viewer fills with their projected thoughts and imaginations. Gallop observes that, “For Barthes, pornography is pure studium whereas the erotic occurs when there is a punctum.”7 She goes on to quote Barthes’s delineation of the erotic from the pornographic: “The erotic photograph, on the contrary (and this is its very condition), does not make the sexual organs into a central object; it may very well not show them at all; it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and it animates me.”8 This understanding of the erotic image animates Silano’s work and allows a space to gaze outside the frame.
Tom of Finland XXL, his hulking monograph (what I often refer to lovingly as ‘the big book’)9. It is a grouping of six men wearing various uniforms: three in biker gear, one in jodhpurs, and two cops on horseback. It’s this photo of the cops that reminds me of the visual acuity and the investigative eye that Silano so deftly uses to create his work. It is just an image of the back of two cops sitting side-by-side on their horses. They mirror each other, their legs forming a delicate tulip silhouette ending in their leather boots touching ever so slightly. Tom takes this otherwise boring image and imbues it with intense erotic desire simply by extracting it from its original context and placing it in proximity to other pictures of things he loves.
Light Touch explores the pleasure of the punctum, where the pornographic photograph is re-materialized as a sublimated print on synthetic fabric, which covers an upright rectangular form roughly the size and shape of a standard hardbound book. Embedded in the flowing folds of the fabric square, we see two hands ringed by spiked leather cuffs grasping a rectangular object also draped in a cloth. The juxtaposition of hardcore bondage gear on a silky fabric surface subverts the hyper masculine posturing the original pornographic image utilized to excite its viewers. In effect, this presentation renders the dungeon master daddy limp-wristed, proposing a queer alternative to binaries of masculine/feminine, bottom/top, and master/sub. In this way, Silano’s Light Touch is a critique of the solidity of male archetypes, standardized roles that remain to this day a staple of gay porn and gay culture.
Silano articulates this problem best: “Many of the depictions on the pages of these magazines are a mock-up of heteronormative masculinity. I think that there is an inherent sadness in that. It is not real, it is all part of a fantasy we are being sold. But sometimes we can allow ourselves to be seduced while still having a critical eye.”10 One can certainly take this critical approach when considering the ripple effect of Tom’s Men, and the ways they can perpetuate masculine archetypes that homogenize gay culture. However, this does not preclude deriving pleasure from Tom’s work.
Zoe Walsh too, looks to vintage pornography for inspiration. For the works in Tom’s Queers, Walsh sourced still photographs from sets of late 70s gay porn films released by Falcon Studios, which built its brand animating a host of Tom’s Men, from biker to lumberjack. To create their work, Walsh digitally manipulates them in programs like Photoshop and Sketchup, altering and removing information and playing with the negative space. They then apply these manipulated images to the canvas using a silkscreen, creating multiple bright, translucent layers of color that overlap, cross-pigment, and permeate each other. They duplicate images and move the action around. The result hints to presence and absence, a blankness that is always filled with colors that came before and after.
Walsh transforms masculine representations into pictures that don’t fit easy categorization. Sure, the guys in the painting started as characters in porn. However, after engaging with contemporary technology, the tools that mediate between analog and digital, the men become something different, something in-between. They are genderless, and in their changed form, they allow for multiple acts of what Walsh terms “dis/identification.”11
In Walsh’s images we are aware of a setting, but it, too, is in flux. While one can make out a swimming pool and what appears to be a metal railing, a plant, and a window, not much is certain. Nothing settles down. In Liquid Eyes, we see two figures posed mid-fellatio, their bodies united into one silhouette. They are still and yet vibrate due to the multiple striations of color that animate the space around them. They repeatedly appear in the painting, overlapping and receding into space. The same sort of peripatetic duplication occurs in A mirror their net. This time a body arches back, head tilted towards the sky in a pose that is nothing but orgasmic. The figure appears and disappears throughout the painting.
This spatial play, this denial of duality, of front/back, left/right, figure/ground, paves the way for new trans subjectivities to flourish. It is a space that contains distance and intimacy at the same time, an indefinable identification with an ever-shifting subject. Considering this mode of interaction with Walsh’s work, I am reminded of Stewart’s assertion that “We continually project the body into the world in order that its image might return to us: onto the other, the mirror, the animal, and the machine, and onto the artistic image.”12 In Walsh’s paintings, this return forever oscillates from viewer to painting and back again.
Walsh eloquently explains how they want their work to communicate, saying, “I want to talk about that space that is shifting and expanding, while also having some specificity based in queer source material. The works stop short at articulating a fixed subjectivity.”13 If one takes a moment, maybe more, to get lost in this flux, the result is more and more possibilities reveal themselves; the image appears endless.
Walsh’s work has an obvious connection with Tom’s through the visual language of pornography and the desire to produce pleasure through new opportunities of embodied identification and dis/representation. However, I believe something else unites the two, which can only be seen when comparing Walsh’s paintings to Tom’s preparatory drawings. In their unresolved state, Tom’s unfinished sketches hint at an ever-possible future while allowing one to project onto them infinite fantasies that ‘complete’ the image. One of my favorites is an unfinished preparatory drawing featured on page 579 in Tom of Finland XXL.14
In this preparatory sketch, we see two figures. The first is suited in a leather jacket with a ‘Tom’s Men’ patch on his shoulder. He reclines, legs spread as his humongous cock and balls sprout from his unzipped leather pants. His arms support the crouching thighs of his partner who squats over the leatherman’s lap as he takes his cock up his ass. What is fascinating about the image is that the squatting gentleman is ‘unfinished,’ he exists as a silhouette outline with barely delineated chest muscles. The space where his cock would be is entirely blank, save the barely defined outlines of two testicles, which could easily be mistaken for enlarged vulva lips. The image is radiantly queer, offering a rare moment of trans subjectivity amid Tom’s otherwise penis-heavy oeuvre. This unfinished drawing is analogous to Walsh’s spectral porn stars. Both allow for an attraction at a remove, a space to project desire and moments where anything is possible.
Dom Victoria’s works also provide trans alternatives to heteronormative presuppositions about sex, race, gender, labor, and bodies that do not quite “fit.” Their artistic practice is deeply informed by their experience as a Black, plus-sized, nonbinary sex worker, taking on the role of a Dom in pre-arranged scenes with mostly white male clients.
Their work explores the power relationships between dom and sub. They propose that within this power relationship, structured by shared contracts and money for labor, the sub is the one who is ultimately always in control. They note that their clients seek to be objectified within the confines of an S&M scene, but when the scene ends, the masks come off, and the clothes go back on, the client inevitably returns to a world that reaffirms his privilege and personhood. The artist’s practice calls into question where the freedom of subspace—the otherworldly sensation one gets from releasing endorphins to relieve pain—ends, and white supremacy begins.
Dom Victoria’s process often starts with reference photos they took of clients during various BDSM scenes. In Hooded Man #6 (Intel Dave) the artist presents viewers with an image of a white male client crouched on all fours. His head, covered in a leather gimp mask, stares directly at the viewer. His face has no eyes, tiny nostril holes, and a closed zipper mouth. However, his stare is discernible through that mask; his gaze is almost hostile. Through an amalgamation of reflected gazes, the painting subtly explores complex power dynamics between dom and sub, viewer and viewed. In the end, we are confronted with a faceless body (a white everyman) who retains agency and power despite his own desired subordination.
It’s worth mentioning that the man in question does not wear a stock-image hood. The artist used digital photo manipulation to meld together many gimp masks to create just the right one. They then printed this photoshopped mask onto canvas and collaged it into the painting. The flowing wall of blue fabric that forms the backdrop of the painting and heightens the theatricality of the scene is also a digitally printed photo on canvas. The result is a situation where the accuracy of the artist’s paintbrush collides with its digital other, sharing the same canvas and causing the viewer to scan back and forth, searching for the represented ‘real.’
The way Dom Victoria creates their work through the seaming together of previously disparate parts is analogous to how Tom went about making his art. In Tom of Finland: The Official Life and Work of A Gay Hero, F. Valentine Hooven III describes Tom’s process, “Once he was satisfied with the various components and had everything at the proper angle and size, Tom used a light table to overlay and trace in all the individual segments of the drawing onto a single sheet of paper. He then rendered the finished drawing in ink, watercolor, tempera, or - his medium of choice - graphite drawing pencil.”15 Even the most idealized representations are just a collage of various externalities.
Be Merciful is a self-portrait created in much the same way as Hooded Man #6 (Intel Dave). In this painting, Dom Victoria towers above the viewer, their head extending beyond the top right frame, with only three strands of black, locked hair falling into view. The brushstrokes that form these locks continue into the horizontal bands that tightly wrap Dom Victoria’s chest. Their right arm, also covered by thick black brushstrokes, extends downward, ending in a collaged digital image of a leather glove holding an impressive, perhaps intimidating, strap-on dildo. The flatness of the glove contrasts with the large phallus, which is rendered in intricate embroidery, amplifying its materiality and signaling to more extensive critiques of gender and craft.
Marcia Tucker, one of the most important curators in the 20th century and founder of The New Museum, explains the relationship of embroidery to gendered hierarchies throughout art history in her essay “A Labor of Love”:
“Tapestry, embroidery, needlepoint and such were much admired from the Renaissance to the late nineteenth-century because they were seen as evidence of upper class leisure and wealth. With the Industrial Revolution, however, these kinds of “female” activities, requiring fine motor skills, dexterity, patience, and of course, good eyesight, came to be considered just work rather than art. Women’s products, particularly embroidery, were dismissed as decorative, “pretty,” or mindless, that is, without content. But according to all accounts, and as most personal experience confirms, what actually happens is that the meditative and self-contained quality of this kind of work reclaims and interiorizes the mind and body, returning them to the sole proprietorship of their owner.”16
Dom Victoria’s painting certainly exemplifies the potential of this kind of ownership of one’s self. In speaking with the artist, they mentioned this painting was a way of putting their cock out there like so many other male artists before them. I’m proud to say Dom Victoria has the biggest cock in this exhibition.
JD Raenbeau’s work deploys an artistic license that melds truth and fantasy to orgasmic ends. His paintings visualize the ecstatic phenomenological and psychological transcendence that comes when loving and fucking meet. The pleasure embodied in Raenbeau’s paintings brings to mind the desirous eroticism that motivated Tom’s work in the first place. After all, Tom made drawings because they made him horny, and got him hard. As Durk Dehner, President and Cofounder of The Tom of Finland Foundation, puts it in his essay “Understanding The Finn,” “...what Tom enjoyed most was recounting the beauty he found all around him in his daily life. It was from this that Tom gathered inspiration. He always said it was his own sexual arousal that was the catalyst for his work — moving mind and arm to create his magnificent men.”17 If Tom’s work begins with arousal and completes its mission via orgasm (or a similar state of heightened sexual pleasure), then Raenbeau’s work inverts this process; the orgasm comes first, and the painting follows.
In his paintings, Raenbeau recreates in striking detail photographs documenting himself and his partner fucking and sucking in their verdant home garden. Raenbeau takes up the task of memorializing this carnal lovemaking in a way that doesn’t merely replicate a photograph, but instead uses the alchemic nature of painting to transform the visible into something extraordinary.
In The Lover Consumed, two pictures of Raeunbeau and his partner appear atop a replica of Jean Honoré Fragonard’s painting Happy Lovers. While delineated with crisp horizontal and vertical lines, the three rectangular images cannot help but coalesce, intermingle, share color and form. The whole scene is explosively ecstatic. Jane Gallop observes that “Ecstacy etymologically derives from the Greek ekstasis, from ex-, “out,” plus “histanai, “to place.” Thus, it means something like “placed out.” Ecstasy is when you are no longer within your own frame: some sort of going outside takes place.”18 In The Lover Consumed we see this reframing made visible, with representations of the artist experiencing ecstasy depicted through many frames, extending all the way back in time to one of his most beloved art historical predecessors, Fragonard, who was also interested in picturing ecstatic and desirable amorous encounters in nature.
By choosing to make the Fragonard his ‘frame,’ Raeunbeau places his own work, and indeed his lovemaking, against the backdrop of art history. In her essay “Rehabilitating the Rococo,” Emma Barker attempts to dissect and problematize the conventional historical assumptions about how rococo frivolity inevitably led to its own demise in the wake of the French Revolution. She notes that this historical view tends to see the rococo as “a superficial and frivolous confection aimed at a decadent aristocracy and, as such, devoid of the seriousness and authenticity expected of high art. There is, however, the obvious difference that, where once it was condemned as ‘modern’ by the standards of the academic tradition, the rococo is now found wanting by the standards of modernist aesthetics.”19 Raenbeau responds to this dismissal through similarity and proximity. He borrows from and supercharges Fragonard’s ‘effeminate’ pastels, pulls the natural world back and forth across picture planes, and enacts an empowered resuscitation of the rococo.
Enrique Castrejon’s work engages a queer analysis of comparisons and comprehension. He asks how representations of sexuality and gender are observed and quantified in printed media. When confronted with his work we are left asking if there can ever be a true measure of the world, any way to transcend the limits of embodied perception.
Like other artists in this exhibition, Castrejon uses found ephemera in his work. He searches the street, online, and in public archives for images that present the LGBTQ body as an object for examination. The artist then proceeds to cut the images up and dissect them looking for specific points of contact where the body intersects with itself or something or someone else. He slices the curvature of a jaw as it meets a neck, traces a jockstrap’s elastic band, separates coiffed hair from head, and excises leather straps from a cocoon-like bondage suit.
The strange dismemberments, though sometimes arrayed in disassociated ways, always seem to follow an order, a system that remains unknown. Having arranged and secured these disparate parts to a page, Castrejon then uses a ruler and compass to measure the disassembled body, calculating inches and angles from as many points as necessary. He then re-inscribes these geometric ‘facts’ on the paper with seemingly obsessive diagrammatic notations, often resulting in outcomes where the written evaluation threatens to overtake its dissected subject. The result is a cacophony of information. The tremendous amount of data written around, onto, and into the image denies any resolution or solution. One is left to ask, at what point does the desire to know an image and extract information from it obscure other modes of sensorial comprehension?
When considering Castrejon’s and Tom’s work, I am reminded of Susan Stewart’s observation: “It is clear that in order for the body to exist as a standard of measurement, it must itself be exaggerated into an abstraction of an ideal. The model is not the realization of a variety of differences. As the word implies, it is an abstraction or image and not a presentation of any lived possibility.”21 Castejon mocks this standard of measurement by putting it into hyperdrive, measuring so much that an abstracted ideal is left unknowable. We see this in works like Portrait of an Osito (Calculado) Measured in inches, where an attractive man whom many would consider already ‘ideal’ is surrounded by numbers detailing the measurements of every inch of his body. Like a swarm of gnats, they encircle him, denying the viewer access. Too many calculations prevent us from knowing him.
Sometimes, however, images can push back. This is best seen in Portrait of a Man in Inches (Looking at Us). In this work, we see a Black man broken to pieces, divided up into sections, each ringed with perfectly executed calligraphic numbers. The pronounced crease running down the man’s arm indicates this image came from some sort of printed ephemera, perhaps an ad from a magazine. I cannot help but decipher Portrait of a Man in Inches (Looking at Us) as a critique of beauty standards reproduced in mass media, how a model’s body is constantly subject to microcosmic judgments comparing it to an impossible ideal. When we consider the apparent race of the body in Castrejon’s work, notions of surveillance and the judgemental gaze of whiteness come to the fore. But there is resistance here. The fragmented and scattered body looks back, the man’s eyes removed from his face, stare directly at the viewer. This penetrating gaze seems to speak to a residual agency, the determination to keep himself together.
When considering Castrejon’s work, I think of Stewart’s reflections on the cuts, slits, and edges of a body. She writes, “The Body presents the paradox of contained and container at once. Thus our attention is continually focused upon the boundaries or limits of the body; known from an exterior, the limits of the body as object; known from an interior, the limits of its physical extension into space. Lacan has described ‘erotogenic’ zones of the body as those areas where there are cuts and gaps on the body’s surface-the lips, the anus, the tops of the penis, the slit formed by the eyelids, for example. He writes that it is these cuts or apertures on the surface of the body which allow the sense of “edge,” borders, or margins by differentiating the body from the organic functions associated with such apertures.”22 We can look to Castrejon’s Nosostros Dos (Both of Us) After the Pandemic as a kind of diagram of Lacan’s analysis. Here we see bodies striped to their erogenous limit, outlines supporting and encircling sexual organs. In this case, Castrejon’s measurements look like an eruption, an ejaculation that erupts from the coitus on the page. Perhaps the pleasures derived from our erotogenic zones are in the end, very, very unmeasurable.
Tom’s work, on the other hand, appears as a celebration of bodies without limits, He revels in an exaggeration of standard measurements by inflating muscles and cocks to often comical proportions. This abstraction is nearly impossible to manifest in a corresponding, real-life human form. We can see this play out in how Tom viewed himself by looking at a small self-portrait photograph in his official biography. The photo’s caption reads, “Tom wearing his own uniform and having undergone the cosmetic alterations of his pencil, makes him an official “TOM’s Man.”23
If we take Hooven’s analysis as truth (and I do), then we are left to determine that the ‘official TOM’s Man’ is the touched-up photograph; it is not Tom himself. The ‘officialness’ can only reside in the picture, not the person.‘TOM’s Man’ is the forever imagined alternative, the liberated representation of desire. Ultimately, no one can really be an ‘official TOM’s Man,’ even with conspicuous bodily modification. Physical perfection isn’t attainable, not just because it requires an eternity in the gym, a pharmacy of muscle-building drugs, or some serious time under a plastic surgeon’s blade. Even the most carefully reproduced ideal always provokes fantasies of something else, the still elusive attainment of what can be.
The real-world Tom’s Man, who is made of flesh and bone, is the living reflection of this imagined representation. If this is the case, there is certainly room for everyone to be one of Tom’s Men.
Works Cited
1) S.R., Sharp, Starfucker magazine, Issue 04, 2011. p.43
2). Duke University Press 2011. p.117
3) Ibid. p.118
4) . Hill and Wang 1977. p.43
5) . 1st pb. ed. Duke University Press 1993. p.157
6) Gallop, Jane. Thinking through the Body. Columbia University Press 1988. p.151
7) Ibid. p.154
8) Barthes, Roland et al. Camera Lucida : Reflections on Photography. Pbk. ed. Hill and Wang 1981. p.59
9) Hanson, D. (Ed.). Tom of Finland XXL. Köln ; Los Angeles, Taschen, 2009. p.41
10) Kokoladze, Salome. “Cowboys Don’t Shoot Straight (like They Used to): Pacifico Silano at HCP.” Glasstire, 23 June 2021, https://glasstire.com/2021/04/19/cowboys-dont-shoot-straight-like-they-used-to-pacifico-silano-at-hcp/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2022.
11) Fishman, Olivia. “Layering Subjectivity.” Artillery Magazine, 7 Sept. 2022, artillerymag.com/qa-with-zoe-walsh/. Accessed 1 Oct. 2022.
12) Stewart, p.125
13) Tenzer, Harrison. “The New Canon: 7 Queer Painters Who Are Tapping into the History Books.” Culturedmag, 20 June 2019, www.culturedmag.com/article/2019/06/20/new-figurative-painting-2019. Accessed 1 Oct. 2022.
14) Hanson, D. (Ed.). Tom of Finland XXL. Köln ; Los Angeles, Taschen, 2009. p.579
15) Hooven, F. Valentine and Jean-Paul Gaultier. Tom of Finland : The Official Life and Work of a Gay Hero. Cernunnos an Imprint of Abrams 2020. p.137
16) Tucker, Marcia et al. A Labor of Love : An Exhibition. New Museum of Contemporary Art 1996. P.53
17) Los Angeles: Taschen. p.9
18) Gallop p.152
19) Barker, E. “Rehabilitating the Rococo.” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, 1 June 2009, pp. 306–313, 10.1093/oxartj/kcp028. Accessed 11 Mar. 2022.
20) Hocquenhem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. London Allison & Busby, 1978. p. 50
21) Stewart p.133
22) Ibid. p.104
23) Hooven p.137
Copyright Tucker Neel 2022
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