Finland Puts Gay Porn Artist Who Eroticized Nazism and Rape On Stamps

When I heard about the Finnish Postal Service's decision to put Tom of Finland's images on stamps I thought it must be some straight people stupidly thinking they were doing something deliciously bold and transgressive.   And apparently that's how it is being presented.  Here's how the Guardian puts it.

The Finnish postal service's decision to use the artist's bold images on a new set of stamps will make philatelic history, but he's not the first gay hero to grace an envelope.

Make no mistake about this, an artist who presented thinly veiled images of Nazis and fascists as erotic heroes, of gay rape as an erotic image is not a "gay hero". Tom of Finland and his drawings are an emblem of internalized hatred by the victims of that hatred.   For country with Finland's recent history to put him on stamps could only mean that the generation for which the Nazi period, the period of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, has ceased to have any formative influence on its public life.   How quickly those hardest of hard lessons are forgotten by the class with enough education and professional attainment to be making the decision of what to put on stamps is extremely disturbing.   Or maybe it's just straight people in the artsy crowd wanting to do something that will impress others in their crowd as being kewl.

Well, I'm not impressed at its kewlness, I'm disgusted.  I don't want those images to be how straight people think of gay men, I certainly don't want gay men to think of ourselves in those term.   Fascism, Nazism, rape, bondage are not what we deserve, we deserve entirely more than that.  We deserve more than being sex objects to each other and certainly more than objects to abuse and discard.   We deserve love and love is incompatible with what Tom of Finland presented as what gay men were all about.   Putting Tom of Finland on stamps is a perpetuation of the hatred of gay men, only by other means that are far more insidious than legal discrimination and oppression.   Once they have gotten gay men to oppress themselves, they've perfected a mechanism of oppression that will be far, far harder to defeat.  When we do it to ourselves and each other, they can say that it's our choice.