Page 80 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

62 Gay Pioneers: How Drummer Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

TOM OF FINLAND AND DRUMMER

Below: The [single brackets] are insertions by Justin Spring into his
own quotation from Sam Steward’s letter; the [[double brackets]] are my
observations.

On February 9, 1978, on one of his increasing rare nights
out, [[the agoraphobic]] Steward had the pleasure [[because of my
invitation]] of meeting Tom of Finland...Steward [[who was a star-
fucker of Valentino, Stein, and Toklas]] wrote Douglas Martin that
“the living legend Tom of Finland...is actually a Finn named Tuoko
[[sic; Touko]] Laaksonen—a nice old geezer, my age bracket, with a
kind of long horsey face...[Since] Jim Kane and Ike Barnes wanted
to meet him...[[Sam begins the structure of his little prevarication]]
I arranged [another] dinner [with him] and [the art dealer] Robert
Opel and [[my lover]] Robert Mapplethorpe. Anyway, Tom and I
were toasted [[by the Drummer editor, as I well recall doing]] as the
two dirtiest men in the Westron [[sic]] world, and as responsible for
an ocean of cum deep enough to float a battleship....
During dinner, Steward had a long conversation [[it was little
more than a sentence or two tossed off by Sam at the sometimes
condescending New Yorker Mapplethorpe who fended Sam off with
his business card]] with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe,
who apparently [[Apparently? As an eyewitness, I rest my case.]]
told him that his erotic studies of black males had been partly
inspired by similar studies by George Platt Lynes....[[as well as,
and even more so, the studies of black males shot by Miles Everitt
and George Dureau. It is meaningful that Mapplethorpe, shooting
leather personalities and players in San Francisco, never bothered
to lens a portrait of Sam.]]

Four days after Sam Steward wrote to Douglas Martin, Tom of
Finland, acknowledging the actual source of the dinner party, wrote
to Al Shapiro and me on February 18, 1978, from New York where
he continued his American tour:

Many thanks for the dinner party which we both, Veli and
I, enjoyed very much. I’d liked to stay in San Francisco
much longer, but even those few days made me feel happy.
Seattle [where he visited between San Francisco and LA]

©Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved—posted 03-16-2017
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