In the decade before his death, Finland-born Touko Laaksonen (1920 – 1991) – best known by the artistic pseudonym Tom of Finland – lived in Los Angeles’ Echo Park neighbourhood, where he spent the final years of his life adding to his prolific catalogue of sexually liberated, libidinally charged illustrations of beefed-up men, which first appeared in Bob Mizer’s homoerotic magazine Physique Pictorial in the 1950s.