Tove and Touko from the Quiet Side of the Street
Two queer icons, one quiet country
There’s a mythic hush that settles over Finland in the imagination. Long winters. Clean lines. A melancholy that’s cozy instead of cold. Into this hush walked two of the country’s most globally enduring cultural exports—Tove Jansson and Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. One painted a dreamscape of soft-spoken longing and moral weirdness; the other inked a world of hypermasculine eroticism, cocked hats and arched brows blazing across repressed postwar Europe.
Jansson and Laaksonen were opposites in many ways. But the further you follow their paths—not just the art but the lives behind it—the more they seem to reflect one another from opposite ends of the same long street. Tove lived quietly, drawing love into rounded creatures who never quite said what they meant. Touko lived loudly, demanding visibility through leather, muscle, and joyful, sexual defiance. Where Tove created a foggy, open-ended world of yearning, Touko cast queerness in bold outlines, staking out space with a permanent marker.
For decades, I missed what was in front of me. As a sheltered, straight guy with a cheese-block of privilege and a handful of Moomin books, I didn’t clock the queerness. Not in Jansson’s lonely homesteads or drifting sailors. Not in her companion Tuulikki, who inspired Too-Ticky. Not in Snufkin, the unattached outsider who always left. And certainly not in Tom of Finland’s porn, which I half-dismissed as kitsch before ever recognizing it as kin to art I revered. Both creators whispered—and shouted—across the decades, but it took me time to hear it.
Watching the films—Tove (2020) and Tom of Finland (2017)—was a threshold moment. These weren’t just biopics. They were reframings. Each took what had long been subtext or subculture and made it legible in ways that lingered. Tove’s film caught her restlessness, her refusal to be captured by one lover, one gender, one box. Tom’s blazed a trail from trauma to triumph, sketch by sketch, a man reclaiming joy through the same medium used to erase him.
But they don’t need to be icons to be powerful. Because here’s the thing—every time we find a celebrated queer elder, we’re also reminded of the ones we lost, or never saw. The Gen Z question—why are there so few older queer people?—isn’t rhetorical. For decades, survival was resistance. Visibility was risk. And joy? Joy was a dangerous indulgence. For every Tove and Touko, there are thousands more whose stories never made it out of the hush.
That’s part of why we made Lowhollow, a quiet little RPG with fog in its lungs and longing in its bones. It’s a game inspired in part by Jansson’s dream logic and emotional sidelong glances. But it also carries a faint echo of Laaksonen’s clarity—characters like Ember who will not be softened, who shout in a land of sighs.
As a writer and game designer, I don’t pretend to speak for the communities these creators came from. But I can acknowledge them. That’s part of what privilege is—not shame, but recognition. Not speaking over, but pointing toward. Honoring a lineage of stories told in fog, sketch, glance, and growl.
Tove and Touko. Moomin and Motorcop. Mist and leather. The quiet side of the street and the loudest room in the club.
Both were survival strategies.
Both were art.
And both remain, even now, reminders that queerness isn’t just a shout or a whisper—it’s a life, lived.
Dedicated, quietly, to Tove and Tuulikki. And to all those who didn’t get the storybook ending, but told their stories anyway.