On a hilly residential street in Echo Park not 10 minutes from the house I lived in when I first moved to LA, sits a stately California Craftsman home on Laveta Terrace, built in 1911. From the outside, it reads as nothing remarkable. A beautiful old house behind a hedge. You would drive past it without a second thought.
But that would be a mistake.
Behind that gate is TOM House — the former home, studio, and creative sanctuary of Touko Laaksonen, the Finnish artist the world came to know as Tom of Finland. While his work has been featured in the collections of major art institutions including the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, it was in this house, in an upstairs studio, where some of the most culturally significant art of the 20th century queer canon was made.
It was here that Laaksonen spent the last decade of his life, creating his homoerotically charged artwork and entertaining guests from the gay community. Robert Mapplethorpe passed through these rooms. John Waters. Andy Warhol. The house wasn't just a home — it was a living node of queer creative life at a time when that life had very few sanctioned places to exist.
To understand what Tom of Finland's work actually did, you have to understand what the world looked like before it.
In the 1950s, U.S. law forbade the sale of anything depicting overt homosexual acts, so Laaksonen created images of muscle-bound, leather-clad figures who left just enough to the imagination for the American fitness magazines that published his work. He was threading a needle between survival and visibility, hiding something revolutionary in plain sight.
But the art wasn't just provocative, it was corrective.
For generations of queer men living in a culture that told them their desire was deviant, shameful, and sick, Tom's drawings offered something radical — an image of themselves as powerful, joyful, and unapologetically present.
The work was political before anyone called it that. It built community before the internet existed to do it for them. Men recognized each other through these images. They passed them hand to hand, and they felt, perhaps for the first time, seen.
His illustrations made their way into the collections of Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe, and John Waters — but long before the art world caught up, it was already doing its most important work in the hands of ordinary queer people who needed it.
This is the part of the story I find most remarkable.
After his first major exhibition in Hamburg in 1976, LA scenester Durk Dehner invited Tom to stay at his home in Echo Park and helped him showcase his artwork in galleries around Los Angeles and San Francisco. A friendship became a partnership, and from 1981 to 1991, Tom split his time between Helsinki and this house in Echo Park, sequestering himself in the attic studio to chain-smoke cigarettes and work on collaged reference pages, sketches, and preparatory drawings.
In 1984, the nonprofit Tom of Finland Foundation was established by Dehner and Tom himself. The Foundation began as a preservation effort and grew into something larger — a safe haven for all erotic art in response to rampant discrimination against art that portrayed sexual behavior or generated a sexual response.
The timing of the Foundation's founding matters more than it might first appear.
By 1984, the AIDS crisis was tearing through queer communities with devastating speed, and with it came a new and vicious cultural weapon: the idea that gay desire itself was the disease. When the public health crisis emerged in the early 1980s, Tom began to question the role his artwork played in the free love that had spread so freely through those years.
For a time, his aesthetic transformed — previously rendered in practical environments with painstaking detail, his work shifted toward portraiture on blank backgrounds and ethereal, heavenly settings. Some portraits depicted people Tom knew who had themselves succumbed to the virus. The work became mournful and grief-soaked.
But Tom didn't retreat into shame, and that choice was its own kind of defiance. In 1987 he made a now-famous drawing encouraging safe sex — an apple-bottomed man in leather chaps giving a thumbs up next to the phrase "Use a Rubber." It was public health messaging delivered in the only language that could actually reach the men who needed it most — their own.
Tom ultimately came to realize that his talent for showing gay men proud of their sexuality would triumph over any shame or stigma the AIDS crisis projected onto the community. At a moment when the world was using a health crisis to justify erasure, Tom of Finland was making the radical argument that queer joy was not the problem. It was the answer.
I've had the privilege of sitting with people who knew Tom personally, who were present for the early years of the Foundation, who watched this house become what it is. That kind of living institutional memory is rare. It changes how you move through the space.
The Foundation isn't a museum in any conventional sense. There's no velvet rope, no audio guide, no gift shop curating your experience into something digestible. It feels lived in because it was lived in — and in many ways still is. Events happen in the garden. Artists come to work. Community gathers.
The Foundation has granted residencies to more than 60 LGBTQ+ artists from around the world — and I've had the honor of being connected to that work firsthand, collaborating on projects that felt continuous with what the house has always been about: queer artists making things that matter in a space that holds them.
In visiting and working with Tom House in this way, I now understand something about why preservation matters. It's not about freezing a moment in amber. It's about keeping a door open — so that the next person who needs what this place offers can walk through it.
Tom House is located at 1421 Laveta Terrace in Echo Park. The Foundation hosts events, exhibitions, and open house opportunities throughout the year — check their website before visiting, as hours and access vary. This is not a drop-in destination, it is an experience worth planning for.
Come with context. Come knowing something about what happened here and why it matters. Come ready to be asked something of yourself.
Tom House has a way of doing that.
The Tom of Finland Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving erotic art and advancing the legacy of Touko Laaksonen. Learn more at tomoffinland.org.
