Touko Laaksonen (Patreon)

When I entered the theater to watch the movie "Tom of Finland", I was fully expecting to see a bad documentary of my favourite gay artist. But instead, it is a good story and I was in tears at certain moments. This film resonates with me on many levels, maybe because I'm a gay artist myself and I've struggled for years to make art my living. If you were not an artist, you would not understand how difficult it is to get noticed and make people actually care about your works. But no matter how difficult it is to be a gay artist nowadays, it's so much harder to be a gay erotic artist at time of "Tom of Finland" (after the WWII), it seemed almost impossible. But Touko made that impossible possible, and I guess that's what's so great about Tom of Finland. And it always reminds me what a great era we are living in right now: I can share my gay art with a lot of people, and more importantly, I can love another man and hold his hand when we walk down the streets.