On a quiet, hilly residential street in Echo Park, behind an unassuming fence, there is a cathedral to freewheeling sexuality, a place where art and sex mingle to such an extent it can be hard to tell the difference. Most Angelenos will be familiar with the Tom of Finland House, the charming 1912 gabled Craftsman where artist Touko Laaksonen drew thousands of horny pictures of cartoonishly sexy gay men in fetish gear in varying states of arousal and intercourse. But unlike the Donald Judd loft or the Richard Neutra house, historic homes that function as ossified tombs where voyeuristic visitors traipse through to gawk at the personal objects of the well-known inhabitants, the Tom of Finland house is less like a museum and more akin to a living, breathing organism.
I visited during its meagre visitor hours—2pm–4pm every Saturday (Google lists it as open on 2pm–4pm on Thursdays, but that is a lie)—in April 2025 with my boyfriend in tow, who was thankfully just as excited to tour an abode dedicated to gay, horny freaks. Every time people asked us what we were doing in Los Angeles he’d gleefully tell them that we were going to see the house of “the gayest guy who ever lived.” We expected to find a sedate home, perhaps filled with a few more penis sculptures than average, but what we found was far rawer and more peculiar.
Tom of Finland, Untitled, 1984. Graphite on paper. ©1984–2025 Tom of Finland Foundation.
Arriving at 1:50pm on a Saturday, we find the house hidden behind a tall hedge and a sweaty repairman working on the gate—a scene so borderline Village People I couldn’t believe it was real. Just outside is a cardboard cutout of a moustachioed beefcake wearing a police hat and skintight pants with a lawn sign saying, “In this house we believe science is real, Black lives matter, no human is illegal, love is love…” and so on. We’re definitely in the right place. The door to the house is wide open so we step in, swiveling our necks in search of the registration desk, but instead are greeted by a bar cart strewn with assorted literature and a donation box. Outside are two men chatting on a richly-furnished porch—a grizzled biker with yellowing, cigarette-stained fingers and a plethora of chunky silver rings, and a very kempt, birdlike man with a trim moustache and circular glasses. The biker guy introduces himself only as “Sharp” and I notice he has what appears to be a handpoked tattoo with the words “Pure Animal” inked on the back of his hand.
After several minutes of chatter, we learn that Sharp is the Tom of Finland guru and the other guy is a tourist from France and the only other person on the tour. The tour begins. Sharp launches into a spiel about Tom of Finland’s time living in the house and how it was officially granted historic cultural monument status in 2016. At this point, Sharp enters the house and retrieves the plaque. Throughout his languorous introduction, it becomes clear that Sharp isn’t some regular docent who fills his retirement hours expounding to visitors about gay art—he actually lives in the house with its owner, Durk Dehner, one other person and up to three visiting artists at a time. He gestures inside. “This is where we host tea salons, life drawing classes, orgies…”
The main floor of the house is dedicated to displaying the works of visiting artists. When we visit, the living room is draped in camouflage netting and a series of classical oil paintings (by an underground and semi-anonymous artist known only as “Orpheus”) which depict men in fetish gear spraying firehose loads of cum hanging above a table covered in gas masks. The dining room, where people ostensibly eat, is plastered with photographs of horrific lumps of mutilated flesh stuck with needles by artist Rachel Britton. In the red 1950-style kitchen, where we do not stop, a man in a bathrobe is casually fixing himself breakfast.
Upstairs, past framed photos of a Japanese weightlifter in tightie-whites and a disco ball shaped like an erect penis, we stop at a portrait photograph of the artist taken by Robert Mapplethorpe—just a casual Mapplethorpe hanging in your hallway. In the main bedroom, several pairs of leather riding boots sit atop a magnificent Art Deco wardrobe carved from burl wood. Admiring the antique built-in picture rails in the next bedroom, Sharp thinks my boyfriend is pointing to a bottle of amyl nitrate above the door and says, “What, you don’t keep your poppers up there?’” The room is strewn with stuffed animals, bagels, a bottle of lube and a giant bra hanging on the door handle. It feels invasive, but Sharp assures us that’s part of the deal—visiting artists live there for free but must vacate their rooms occasionally so that a parade of strangers can gawk at their stuff. Just outside the bathroom is a chair upholstered with a pair of cum-stained jeans.
Sharp opens a linen closet door that reveals a patchwork collage of all manner of erect penises and announces if we’d like our penises to be considered for display, there’s an email we can send dick pics to. The next stop on the tour is the archive room, where hundreds of tomes containing Tom of Finland’s work are catalogued. My eyes wander towards a moody black-and-white photograph of a very well-hung guy impressively sucking his own cock. When I remark on the image, a man in the library tells us he once shared a hot tub with the guy and confirmed that the party trick was, indeed, the real deal.
Tom of Finland, Untitled, 1984. Graphite on paper. ©1984–2025 Tom of Finland Foundation.
We open a glory hole door and climb another precarious flight of stairs that leads to an attic, where we pass a man working at a desk piled high with papers. Past the makeshift office is a small bedroom that’s as close as we’ve come to a museum yet: a small bed with a Tom of Finland duvet, with framed pictures of his work above the bed and Tom’s own military jacket and leather jackets on display. This is the studio where Tom slept and spent hours of the day diligently drawing his hardcore pornography. Sharp sits on the edge of Tom’s bed. I can see him getting weary and emotional, recounting his memories of Tom’s later days. I immediately snap back into reality—Tom wasn’t just a horny guy who loved to draw burly men getting each other off, he was Sharp’s friend and the space we’re in is somehow both a lurid sex palace and the physical embodiment of Tom’s erotic legacy.
Finally, the tour is over, and Sharp brings us to the souvenir room, where we can purchase all manner of Tom of Finland-themed goods. We opt for a coffee table book, which Sharp asks us if we’d like signed. It doesn’t seem like no is an option, so I hand it over and he leaves a small, squiggly pencil flourish in pencil inside the front cover. We leave in a daze, sated yet soggy with the amount of information, as well as heart and soul, absorbed over the course of the 1.5-hour tour.
At 115 years old, the Tom of Finland house may not be there forever. It sits within a zone labeled “very high” risk according to newly drawn fire maps in the wake of the 2025 wildfires. As a result, the foundation has begun taking the necessary steps to safeguard the collection from any future natural disasters that may befall it. The future of the organization remains in flux, but at least we’ll always have sex.
