Finding Tom is a participatory art piece created with Vili von Nissinen in 2020. Finding Tom combines theatre, live action role playing and other art forms and tells the life story of Finnish gay men living in Helsinki between 1940-1970. It is a journey from persecution to acceptance, from darkness to light, and it makes Tom of Finland's art’s impact in the gay men’s fight for freedom tangible.
In Finding Tom all participants take on an active role instead of being observers. Every participant immerses into the role of a gay man from Touko Laaksonen’s time. Tom of Finland himself is not present in the art piece, but his art and influence is.
The participants go through the journey we offer being themselves the main protagonist, creating an intimate, personal experience of the themes of the piece. Every participant gets a prewritten character for the story that is based on research and actual experiences from the time, both good and bad. The artpiece discusses not only liberation but also its price: the double life many gay men lived, discrimination inside the homosexual minority, opposing activism and the results of decades of lying. The history and experiences of gay men in the 40’s to 70’s are not simplified or polished into heroic narratives, they remain complex, versatile, real life stories.
The participants are prepared for the play through a series of exercises. The pre-show workshops go through practising masculine body language and speech and flirting and cruising in the spirit of Tom of Finland’s art.
During the artpiece itself the participants are guided through a series of scenes that depict the life of Tom of Finland and the gay men of his era. We help immersing into the world of Finding Tom with symbolic elements: a leather harness and a jacket. In the beginning the harness is hidden tightly under the jacket, but during the journey the jacket opens and in the end is taken off completely.
The piece starts with a symbolic ritual during which the participants dress the leather harnesses on each other and then put on the “oppression jackets” themselves. The ritual depicts being born gay in the 30’s in Finland, the shame, pain and the pressure the society forces on you.
In the scenes the participants live through cruising in Helsinki’s parks during a war time black out, the start of relationships and the gay community, secret gay parties that get raided by the police, their first contact with Tom of Finland’s art and the feeling of acceptance it gives, the start of political activism and the first gay rights demonstrations in Finland.
In the last scene the characters are immortalized as Tom of Finland’s art in a joyful fantasy. During the scene the participants get a portrait photo taken of them as a Tom’s man to remember the experience by.
In a symbolic end ritual the participants leave their characters behind and promise to continue on the path of Tom of Finland in the fight against discrimination.
In this photo gallery are participants in Finding Tom posing like Tom’s men; proud, sexy and masculine, like Touko’s models posed for him for his drawings:
Finding Tom has now been run five times: 10th, 13th, 22nd and 24th September 2020 in Helsinki, Finland and 15th October in Malmö, Sweden. Two of the runs were a part of the Helsinki Pride week’s official programme, one in Finnish and one in English. The run in Malmö was part of the official World Pride 2021 programme. There have been a total of 56 participants.