The following is a letter I wrote to the board of the Tom of Finland Foundation to express my disapproval of their recent actions regarding the future of the Tom of Finland Foundation. I am also sharing it more widely as I believe it offers valuable context and perspective for how their actions have affected and will continue to affect the queer community, both locally here in Los Angeles and globally. As we rally to save TOM House, it is imperative that we understand the nature of the board’s recent actions and that we whole-heartedly reject them as a community.
To the Board of Directors of the Tom of Finland Foundation,
I am writing as a member of the queer community of Los Angeles to express my disgust with your recent actions. Your brazen and rapacious dismantling and pillaging of one of the Los Angeles queer community’s most cherished cultural and social institutions are appalling. No amount of corporate whitewashing or rhetorical polish can obscure the obvious reality that lies behind your self-congratulatory and mendacious ''Community Update''. The real community here, those of us who live, breathe, work, love, and gather in this city, (i.e. those of us who constitute the community - who are the community you dare to purport to not only address, but protect and represent) has received the news of this developing (or more accurately: deteriorating) situation with universal revulsion. For us, the TOM House and the foundation it so lovingly housed for decades were the heart of our community. Not just in a sentimental sense, but in its function as an organ which circulated a vitalizing social spirit through community, bringing people together to form connections which they bring back with them into the world. It was a home not just for the foundation, art, and artists, but for any queer person looking for a place to feel welcome. It is a rare (the word ''rare'' doesn’t do it justice, it is a one-of-a-kind anomaly in this world) third space, where queer people can gather outside of the auspices of business (i.e. a night club or a bar) to learn, socialize, and connect. Your callous and extractive policies threaten to destroy this most important and historic space. This is in addition to the Massive (capital M for millions) financial asset you have alienated from the community in the form of Tom’s art (we all know this was the ultimate prize). A financial asset which Tom explicitly wished remain accessible to us.
The extraction of these invaluable cultural assets would, in a just world, be seen for the pillaging and abuse of an already marginalized and vulnerable community that it is, and you would be named for the ambitious and petty gang of looters who you are. Under the guise of protecting art, you ruthlessly exploited the letter of the law to disenfranchise and elder of our community, an old man with no other source of income, and pry from his hands the fruit of his life’s labor. Durk Dehner, together with Tom, created the foundation, and he has dedicated his life to nurturing it. He has poured his blood, sweat, tears, and money - his entire being - into the organization which, as anyone who knows him personally, he refers to as his and Tom’s child. To drive a wedge between this man and his proverbial offspring and alienate him from the product of his life’s labor is a course of action so divorced from Tom’s wishes for not only his legacy, but his lover’s life, that it is hard to overstate. They viewed this organization as the gift they would leave to the world - i.e. to us. The heartlessness it would take to kick a man, who has all of himself to this foundation, to the curb is difficult for me to comprehend, and the entire affair reeks of a kind of putrid, dispassionate greed only possessed by the most cynical and predatory members of our society.
This is all not to mention the most reprehensible and deplorable type of historical revisionism you seek to exercise via your censure of Durk’s name from your website. This new webpage diminishes Durk, the man who’s labor you all profit from and seek to claim as your own, to a peripheral character in his own story and minimizes his contributions to queer history to little more than a footnote. I can declare confidently that your attempts to erase Durk from history and appropriate his life’s work to grow your already over-inflated and cancerous senses of self-importance will fail. Those of us who know Durk and have been touched by his uncompromising spirit of radical self-expression, recognize him, for all his flaws, as a pillar of this community, as an elder, and as a pioneer who dedicated his life to uplifting queer people and transgressing against the structures that would see us ablated from the fabric of society. We recognize that it is because of him, and countless others whose names we don’t remember, that we have the freedom to live as our authentic selves in the community that they forged against the violent fires of oppression and discrimination and whose walls they shored up to whether the storm of the AIDS crisis. This - nothing short of what we take for granted as our lives - was our elders’ gift to us, and we owe them everything for it. To not just turn your backs on them, but to willfully and intentionally treat them abjectly, dispossessing them of the very thing they created to protect themselves from a hostile world which continually rejected them and denied them the ability to live, is to reproduce the same structures of violence and oppression against which Tom and Durk so bravely fought and transgressed.
If Tom were able to speak to us, there is no question in my mind that he would be revolted at this committee of vultures who have ransacked the treasures he left to his community and deprived his lover of his means of subsistence - you disgrace his name and his legacy. Tom wanted this art and this organization to remain in the care of Durk and the foundation they founded together in Los Angeles, not shipped off to New York City to be industrially milked and cheapened by a desperate clique of power hungry social climbers. To those of us who know personally the people who have given their all to building this organization and the community which inhabits it (none of whom, by the way, are you people - I have never seen any of you anywhere near a Tom of Finland Foundation event in this city - none of you even showed your miserable faces at the FXLK PLAY group retrospective!) this was clearly a kind of hostile takeover under the guise of fulfilling a non-profit’s duties. I remind you all that a non-profit is meant to benefit the public, not alienate a community of marginalized people from the institutions it built in the face of adversity!
When this course of events is observed in its broader historical context, a very clear picture begins to emerge. This is nothing short of a continuation of the violent process of enclosures of public and communal goods which the most predatory elements of our society have continually perpetuated to manufacture the conditions which satiate their unceasing appetite for domination and self-enrichment.
And what have you left in the wake of your heroic crusade to preserve and promote art? Nothing but a wrecked crater. No lifeline for the community here keep our beloved community space alive - let alone a lifeline for Durk to keep himself alive. TOM House is a haven in which queer people can gather, learn, connect, and uplift one another, and will hopefully continue to be such a place despite the reckless actions you have undertaken to cripple it.
Your wanton anointment of yourselves with flashy new titles lays bare your true nature as shameless marauders relishing in their spoils. The nobody Brooke Wise, who fumbled her way up off of her sister’s coat-tails or the floundering and unctuous changeling-of-no-renown Robert Knox Hayes (who is too ashamed to list his Alma Mater on his linkedin) now don the titles they stole from those they fired as if they were war trophies (Sorry, my mistake - nobody was fired, rather the dead weight of the foundation was so prudently and rationally streamlined out of its operating costs. What I actually meant to do was thank you all for your efficient management of human resources).
I’m sure you are all delighted with this extra feather in your collective cap, but never forget that the plumage from which you plucked it belonged to the last bird of a dying species. When queer communities around the country suffocate under the siege of a reactionary and violent government (as of the writing of this letter, our Title IX protections were just revoked), instead of standing in solidarity with them and protecting one of their last remaining institutions, you chose to seize the opportunity to gorge yourselves on fruits which your labor did not bare. You chose to take from a city you do not live in, expropriate its cultural heritage, and line your pockets with it. You claim to stand for the preservation and promotion of queer art, yet every action you have taken leads clearly and inevitably to the withering away and decay of our culture. The house Tom lived in is a beautiful place. It is a living, breathing museum of queer cultural history. It is a priceless heritage site, and the scope of its stewardship has grown to include countless invaluable artifacts. To leave it derelict and withdraw the financial resources it so desperately depends on, is a conscious and deliberate act of neglect and destruction which can not only be seen as part of the broader persecution and erasure of queer people in the United States, but as direct confutation of the foundation’s stated goals. You killed a unicorn to harvest its horn and left the body to rot. Your grotesque and depraved self-aggrandizement places you comfortably at home with the likes of Trump and his decadent and degenerate ilk. It is their wave you ride and their tune you gleefully hum along to. This community will never forget how you chose to act and which side of history you stood on. Shame on all of you.
Sincerely,
Andy Marino
Los Angeles
USA