Tom of Finland, born Touko Valio Laaksonen, is known for his drawings of the male nude. For Tom it’s the buff Leather Daddy. His masterful graphite drawings on paper have a rare level of effortless mastery. Tom is in a long lineage of queer artists depicting muscular male bodies. George Platt Lynes, a photographer active in the 1930s and 1940s, shot silver gelatins of robust male bodies, printed with refined soft grey tonality. Lee Brozgol, active in the 70s and early 80s, depicted cut male bodies, acting out east village tableaux, with sharded layers of acrylic color tightly shoved up next to one another, giving an effect that wouldn’t be seen until the advent of tumbler painting. Today we find the queer male nude more often rendered as waifish and in heroin chic fashion. Photographers like Ryan McGinley, Ren Hang and a slew of less important ones shot this male archetype through and past the Aughts. Julien Nguyen, with his exceptional and haunting paintings in similar gaunt form, immortalizes this body. If these artists are popular voices depicting these subjects for their generations, which often is the case when an archetypal figure pictured represents a whole, then the obvious distinction between these two bodies carries weight. The utility of strength says something about the difficulty of their eras, as with the hallow of the waif may say something about the futility and nihilism of ours.
-Alex Berns