A Summer of Tom:
Before the Men | Acts of Devotion
Presented by the Queer Culture Arts Foundation (QCAF) and Tom of Finland Foundation
In collaboration with David Kordansky Gallery and Fire Island Tea.
VENUE
The Gallery at the Visitors Center
36 Fire Island Blvd.
Fire Island Pines, New York, 11782
DATES
June 14–15, 2025 – Preview & Opening Weekend
Select works on view through
September 2025
SEASON OVERVIEW
A Summer with Tom is a season-long cultural activation in Fire Island Pines that celebrates the intersections of erotic art, queer lineage, and collective memory.
This two-part program includes:
THE EXHIBITION
Before the Men
This landmark show features fifteen original preparatory drawings by Tom of Finland—works never before exhibited, offering a rare look into Tom’s artistic process and practice.
These early works thrum with fantasy, vulnerability, and the raw energy of queer becoming—before the myth, before the men, before the icon.
Installed for the first time in Fire Island Pines—a historic home for queer creativity and sensual liberation—this exhibition invites viewers to engage with Tom’s early imagination as both cultural inheritance and sacred archive.
A COMMUNITY WORKSHOP
Acts of Devotion
In partnership with Fire Island Tea, this participatory workshop invites members of the queer public to share in creative creation, reflections, and memories around intimacy, erotic lineage, and devotion.
Collectively collaborating to create and inspire a new body of work between the community and queer image-makers and artists, culminating in a limited-edition art book that functions as both archive and altar.
All proceeds from the publication will benefit QCAF and Tom of Finland Foundation.
CURATOR
Marc R. Christensen is a writer, curator, and cultural steward whose work explores the power of queer memory, erotic lineage, and community-built archives. As founder of the Queer Culture Arts Foundation (QCAF), Marc leads with a belief that storytelling is preservation—that queerness, when archived with intention, becomes sacred testimony.
His curatorial practice blurs the lines between art, memoir, and ritual. He views queer erotic art not just as visual pleasure, but as sacred memory: a site of resistance, reverence, and survival. In A Summer with Tom, Marc brings this lens to a pivotal but rarely seen chapter in Tom of Finland’s development as an artist. The result is more than an exhibition—it is a queer devotional, a space where fantasy and history meet.
Fire Island has long been a haven for queer creativity and experimentation. Legends like Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Paul Cadmus, Peter Berlin, Robert Mapplethorpe, and George Platt Lynes all passed through, created here, or were inspired by its particular alchemy of sensuality and freedom. For generations, Fire Island has held space for artists to invent and reinvent what queer expression could be.
And yet, in all this time—Tom of Finland never arrived on our shores.
Until now.
With Before the Men, QCAF brings Tom’s original drawings to Fire Island for the very first time—marking a historic and poetic arrival. The Pines, long a place of erotic refuge, welcomes the artist who shaped so much of our collective desire. The installation becomes an offering across time—a bridge between past and present, between myth and memory, between those who came before and those who still gather here to dream.
Tom of Finland
(born Touko Laaksonen, Finnish, 1920-1991)
One of the most influential artists in queer history, Tom of Finland’s work is widely celebrated for his groundbreaking representation of the male figure. In his youth, Tom trained at an advertising school, but what he would come to call his “dirty drawings,” which he first began developing as a teenager, were the true focus of his attention, both during this formative period and throughout the entirety of his life. These masterful renderings of virile men engrossed in acts of homoerotic desire can be approached along several interpretative lines—art historical, social, technical—but each of them points to the revolutionary nature of his project. A master draftsman, whose passion for both his medium and his subject matter enabled him to become a powerful cultural force, Tom gave form to an imaginative universe that in turn helped fuel real-world liberation movements and enabled gay men to access their strength in new ways. Tom’s drawings reaffirm the centrality of sexuality, joy, and the body in all areas of human endeavor.
ADD’L. INFORMATION
Framed drawings will be on display at intervals throughout the summer; private previews available upon request. To ensure the works are on view, inquire here.
Proceeds support the ongoing preservation of queer art and culture through QCAF and Tom of Finland Foundation.
To request access to high-res images, press assets, or artwork information:
marc@qcaf.org