#androgony

TOM OF FEMMELAND: G.B Jones's Tom Girls

Tom of Finland for the girls, the hyper-masculine, homoerotic world of artist Tom of Finland became an unlikely inspiration for G.B. Jones's subversive queer aesthetics.

"It can be said, with or without facetiousness, that Jones attended the Tom of Finland School of Drawing. Just as two bodies might find one another across a room or a bar, a communion far more formidable to the corroboration of character can occur over an expanse of time and space—by way of aligned intentions—through art. During the middle of the night, at a kitchen table under an amber bulb, pencil in hand, beside an ashtray that clocked the hours with its crumpled contents, in this quiet realm began a series Jones dubbed the Tom Girls, which was ultimately exhibited in galleries around the world and remains a pertinent contribution to third-wave feminist art. In the course of those nights Jones came into possession of a drafting skill that is at once her own, but also the latest, and possibly among the last, iterations of a descendancy in guration—cartooning in the highest sense.