The Leather Daddy’s War Over Tom of Finland

Durk Dehner, the public face of the Tom of Finland Foundation for over 40 years, in 2025.
Photo: Elliott Morgan

For four decades, the Tom of Finland Foundation was headquartered in a 1911 craftsman house in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles that is stuffed with the artist’s illustrations of leather-uniformed men flashing rippling chests and throbbing bulges. The work of other erotic artists lines the walls, and the ceilings are covered with frescoes of nude angels exchanging oral sex. A library holds thousands of vintage gay magazines such as Drummer and Honcho, and in the backyard is the Pleasure Park, a cruising ground and sculpture garden that has its own swing. “You could not possibly count the number of dicks on display,” says Carta Monir, who lived there as part of the foundation’s artist-in-residency program. “As a trans woman, I was very ready for it to be a very gender-essentialist experience. And actually, it was wonderful. No weirdness; no discomfort. Incredibly welcoming. Durk gave us the first tour, actually.”

Durk is Durk Dehner, who bought the house in 1979 with his boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, and ex-boyfriend’s boyfriend. He met Tom of Finland in the late 1970s, and, for a time, they had a sexual relationship; mostly they were friends. Whenever Tom came to America, he stayed in a room on the third floor, sometimes for six months at a time. He and Dehner went into business together, first through a business partnership that split the revenues from licensing Tom’s imagery into Tom of Finland-branded products, and later in forming the Tom of Finland Foundation to oversee his work and papers. After Tom’s death in 1991, control of the foundation passed to Dehner, who ran it as a scrappy community hub, offering beds to artists and other castaways at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

Dehner convinced the German publisher Taschen to print several books of Tom of Finland’s work, got the government of Finland to put Tom of Finland on its official stamps, and, in addition to thousands of Tom originals, amassed a collection of queer erotic art spanning 6,000 works by over 800 gay artists, including Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean Cocteau, Bruce Weber, George Quaintance, and Michael Kirwan, whose ashes were planted at the base of a citrus tree in the backyard of his house. In all, the collection is estimated to be worth at least $40 million. Now 77, Dehner sees promoting Tom’s work as his life’s mission. “I was the tool for a gift, and the gift was Tom of Finland, and I wanted him to utilize me,” he says.

Then, last year, Dehner was pushed to resign as president of the foundation and to give up his seat on the board of directors. He had always been more of a public face than a traditional nonprofit director — the foundation, which never had more than a few hundred thousand dollars in assets, spent more money than it took in for three years in a row starting in 2021. But the reason for the dismissal was a recent photo Dehner had submitted as part of an application to judge an International Mr. Leather contest that featured him wearing a leather S.S. hat. He maintains the outfit was fetish-wear, not an act of hate speech. “My own board threw me under the bus, and didn’t give me a chance for any rebuttal, and that was unfair and not democratic,” he says. “But the way cancel culture works is that it isn’t democratic. It’s just: Off with your head.”

With his partner S.R. Sharp, who was then vice-president of the foundation, Dehner recruited new board members he hoped would be sympathetic to his cause. But the effort didn’t work out as planned. The new board members, a group of New Yorkers with limited nonprofit experience, encountered what they perceived as a mismanaged organization and seized control in order to course-correct. This past summer, they stopped paying rent on the house, fired most of the staff, and filed a complaint with the attorney general of California accusing Dehner of collecting royalties they said belonged to the foundation.

Dehner, who denies the charge, fired back with a website, Save Tom House, calling for the board’s ouster. The campaign has found favor among former artists-in-residence and employees, who have taken their grievances to social media. “It was almost like a private equity firm came in and just wanted to pick off all the social cachet and use the brand and use our resources for their own social gain,” says Craig Pratt, who worked part-time at the foundation last year.

The dispute between the board and the longtime caretaker has left the foundation on the brink of collapse and the original work of a seminal gay artist hidden from public view in a storage facility in downtown Los Angeles. The board of directors continues to fundraise as it looks for a permanent home for the nonprofit. For Dehner, who is at work on a book about his life with Tom, regaining control of the organization he cofounded is a deeply personal crusade. “This house has a kind of spirit that is very special, and when people come here for events, they feel it and they actually contribute to it. It really is about them feeling that they can be themselves, they can be anyone they want to be, and it’s okay here,” he says. “Tom House is not just a building. It’s an organic energy source.”

Tom of Finland, whose given name was Touko Valio Laaksonen, started composing erotic sketches of soldiers after he was drafted into the Finnish Army in 1940. He published his work pseudonymously, originally in American beefcake magazines such as Physique Pictorial, where publisher Bob Mizer gave him the cheeky nickname “Tom of Finland.” Reproductions of Tom’s sketches came to paper the walls of gay nightclubs and bars across the U.S. and Europe, and by the end of the century he had, through word of mouth, become the world’s most commercially successful gay erotic artist, influencing the designs of Jean Paul Gaultier and Tom Ford, and attracting admirers such as Mapplethorpe and the artists Mike Kelley and Catherine Opie.

In 1976, Dehner, a part-time model and waiter, spotted a flyer with one of Tom’s sketches at the Spike bar, a gay leather bar in Chelsea. The illustration was part of an ad for a bike run — a bar crawl for gay motorcyclists — and Dehner was captivated by the image, a visual of a shirtless man in black leather pants, his bulge almost comically engorged. The next day, a friend told him the artist’s name and shared his home address in Finland. Dehner and Tom began a correspondence and, a year later, when Tom was planning a trip to America, “I begged him to let me be his host,” Dehner says. Tom accepted.

The business they started together would eventually get Tom of Finland’s horny leather daddies plastered on bookends, mugs, tank tops, candles, shot glasses, jockstraps, and even clothes by high-end fashion labels such as JW Anderson and Diesel. After Tom’s death, Dehner raised money from gift-shop sales, donations, and rent from the artist-in-residence program, which charged fellows $690 a month in exchange for living accommodations. By 2023, his annual salary was $34,068. He also earned roughly $30,000 in rent payments from the foundation and between $10,000 and $30,000 in royalties from licensing Tom’s work.

For years, the board of directors was made up of a hodgepodge of Dehner’s friends and acquaintances: There was the Off-Broadway playwright Dan Berkowitz and the artist Cliff Benjamin; there was also an airline customer-service agent named Carl Porrino, whom Dehner said he “met on social media.” Sharp has served on the board off and on since the late 1990s. “I had to have some type of personal connection with the person,” Dehner says of the board members and employees he brought on.

The organization’s staff never amounted to more than six people, and the foundation budget was always below $1 million — often well below. Many of those who passed through the house spoke fondly of their experience. José Tinoco, who started volunteering at the foundation in 2019 before taking a full-time job there, often went to Dehner and Sharp for advice about dating and sex; on his 21st birthday, before a night out at the the Eagle, Dehner and Sharp gifted him a pair of leather motorcycle pants and a leather wrist cuff. “They walked me down the stairs like I was going to prom,” Tinoco says. Monir once invited a photographer over who was interested in working with her. She walked naked around the house, posing for photos while staffers and volunteers worked. “People were making lunch, and there was some kind of business meeting going on, and nobody even blinked,” she says. “That’s just the kind of environment it is.”

Others were less enthused by Tom House’s freewheeling spirit. When Dana Bramble, who was in charge of fundraising for the foundation, showed up for her first day of work, she was led to her desk in a corner of the attic. At one point, an older man in a bathrobe ducked into a crawl space beside her and disappeared behind a pair of white vertical blinds. Bramble was alarmed when he didn’t come out for hours and appeared to be napping. It was only a day later, when she asked a colleague who he was, that she discovered his name was Loyalty and that he lived there, in the four-foot-high crawl space by her desk.

Even Dehner’s supporters admit the house had seen better days. On hot days, they would huddle around a single ratty air conditioner in the attic. For a time, the ceiling leaked when it rained and bees took up residence in two hives at the house. A stale odor of cigarette smoke seemed to permeate every room. Meetings with the executive director took place in the bedroom where Tom died, which Dehner preserved intact, leather jackets, Finnish military uniform, awards, trophies, posters, and belt buckles all in their place. “I have to tell you, there’s something weird about being called into your boss’s office and there’s a bed between the two of you that a man died in,” says Pratt. “It was gay Gray Gardens, run by men who are stuck living in yesteryear.”

Around 2021, the board chairman Rob Hennig, an employment lawyer, told Dehner it was time to let a nonprofit professional take the helm. Hennig hired a consultant, who concluded the foundation also needed to offer some basic human resources benefits, like giving employees sick days. “Before then, I can’t say that we were adhering to all of the rules within California best practices,” Dehner says. Eventually, the board selected its treasurer, Edward Cella — an architectural historian who had worked across the nonprofit sector — to become chief executive. One of his first decisions was to move the foundation and its vast holdings out of the house in Echo Park.

For years, pieces from the world’s largest gay erotic art collection were hung in Dehner’s living room, which was neither temperature-controlled nor protected: The front door was often unlocked. The rest — fine artworks, framed sketches, and sculptures from Tom and other artists — was stored in a free-standing, air-conditioned POD in the driveway. Tom’s unframed illustrations, sketches, gauche paintings, letters and journals, VHSes, DVDs, photo negatives, and scrapbooks of magazine clippings are held in two giant bank safes in a converted garage. Though outside consultants had strongly encouraged better long-term storage, Dehner resisted the move, fearing he would lose access to Tom’s work.

Then, in January 2025, an Instagram user by the name Pup Diego Onyx surfaced a headshot of Dehner wearing the leather Nazi hat. The costume is common in leather fetish culture, which attempts to appropriate and eroticize symbols of hate and violence, but Dehner says Cella used the incident as an excuse to oust him from the board. “Edward really did not like me, and so when I had that social canceling situation, they just jumped on the opportunity,” says Dehner, insisting that, across two to three decades of wearing the hat to fetish events, no one had ever told him the outfit was offensive. It was an erotic outfit, not a political one, he says. “I didn’t even pay attention when I sent the photograph in.” For Cella, Dehner’s actions fit a pattern. “I’ve known this organization since 2013,” he wrote in a statement. “Durk has pushed out those board members, employees, and friends who questioned his authority or his decision-making about key aspects of the organization.”

Cast out of the foundation he’d spent his life building, Dehner was in a strange position. The organization remained headquartered at his home, and he continued to have lunch with staff. But he was excluded from meetings and decision-making. “They wanted me gone, so in order to prevent them from having control over decisions, we brought on different people,” he says, referring to Sharp, his partner. Among the recruits were Brooke Wise, an independent curator who had helped plan shows for the foundation; Terence McFarland, who had previously worked at the theater nonprofit Los Angeles Performance Practice; David Aldea, a former Soho House executive perhaps best known for being Taylor Swift’s landlord when she lived on Cornelia Street in New York; and Robert Knox Hayes, a 37-year-old banker and financial adviser.

Hayes became involved in 2024 after meeting a foundation staff member at Aspen Gay Ski Week. He toured the house with Dehner soon after — his first time in Los Angeles — and was electrified by what he saw. “It feels like Tom is still there in the room with you,” he says. Dehner and Sharp, meanwhile, “felt like my gay grandparents.” Hayes was reaching the end of his term on the board of Equality New York, and he wanted to be part of an organization that could get him closer to the art world. “I didn’t want to be a finance guy, and I don’t want to be known as a finance guy,” he says. After joining, Hayes recruited Nolan Feng, a tech entrepreneur, which brought the total number of board members to nine, six of whom Dehner perceived as his allies. “I think Durk has always believed that we were going to put him back in the president position on the board,” Hayes says.

In July 2025, the new board voted not to renew Cella’s one-year contract. It was unanimous only because Hennig and another board member abstained, and a third resigned during the meeting. Aldea was announced as the interim executive director and, a month later, Hayes was appointed board chair. Besides a course they each had taken at the Aspen Institute for new directors of nonprofits, neither man had much professional experience in the field. The new board members set out to raise money for the foundation, which had only $69,312 in the bank at the start of the year.

Goals were modest. On the foundation’s website, five tiers of membership support were offered, from a $30-a-year “eNews subscription” to a $1,000-a-year package that includes a T-shirt and a house tour. The group had an eye for a glamorous party, but they were less savvy at actually making money from one. In December, a benefit at the design studio Apparatus in New York raised $12,000, but spent $10,000 on catering. For an event in Paris last month, the board secured $75,000 in sponsorship from the website PornHub; after expenses, it is expected to leave the foundation with “a surplus of several thousand dollars,” Wise wrote in an email earlier this month. Over the last two years, she continued, the board has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars. “I personally raised $95,000 over the last 60 days,” she says.

The board members are themselves not frequent donors, which has led to complaints from staff. “These social climbers from New York were really just doing nothing but stripping the foundation and the brand of its social value, and using that to parlay into parties that really turned into nothing,” Pratt says. Hayes has only given $1,000 since joining the board in 2024. “I’m a young professional, and I don’t come from a rich family,” he says.

The relationship with Dehner began to deteriorate in March when Hayes discovered what he considered an inconsistency in the legal arrangements around Tom of Finland’s work. Dehner had personally collected 50 percent of the licensing royalties, per the terms of a 1984 partnership agreement with the artist; the rest went to the foundation. In his 1991 will, Tom passed his 50 percent share down to Dehner in writing. But the will named their company as “Tom of Finland Inc.,” a business that didn’t technically exist yet. The two had set up a “doing business as” agreement under this name in Los Angeles County, but not as a formal company. Dehner wouldn’t register the company officially until 1994.

The new board interpreted this gap to mean that all of Tom’s licensing royalty belonged to the foundation, not to Dehner personally, and accused him of enriching himself with foundation assets. Hayes also claimed that a 2024 memo of understanding, which was intended to resolve the decades of legal and financial murkiness and to formally grant Dehner his 50 percent personal cut of all licensing royalties, was not valid because the board did not vote on it. (Dehner and Sharp maintain that the previous board actually had approved of the memo.) Hayes set up a meeting with Dehner to resolve the issue and extended an olive branch: Dehner could loan the 18 pieces of Tom’s art he personally owned—mostly, photos and sketches of Dehner himself—to the foundation in exchange for a fee. Dehner refused. “Pretty much after that, Durk and I stopped speaking,” Hayes says.

More sobering news arrived in May when Hayes got an assessment that the foundation was projected to spend around $250,000 over the next year in legal fees, a catastrophic obligation it could not afford. Much of the expense was attributed to a 2023 lawsuit Dehner filed against CultureEdit, a retail store he had hired to license Tom of Finland’s work for T-shirts, muscle shirts, and action figures. Dehner claimed the store owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalty payments. CultureEdit countersued, alleging the foundation had, among other things, cut the store out of deals it had negotiated. (Neither suit has been resolved.) “When we realized the dollar amount of those legal expenses, it just hit a point of like, enough is enough,” Hayes says.

The foundation stopped paying rent to Dehner and made plans to lay off most of the staff, which it did in June over a Zoom call. Catalina Bulgach, an archivist who had just finished several months of work cataloging all 1,722 pieces of Tom’s art, was asked to spend her last two weeks helping to move the collection to the offsite storage facility Crozier Fine Arts in downtown Los Angeles. That is where the artwork remains today. Hayes hopes to make it available to the public and to researchers again by digitizing it, a costly process, and potentially by donating it to an existing queer archive, such as the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California. “I understand it’s an emotional and painful process to have it move, but it was just very clear that we needed to do this, and it was in the best interest of Tom’s legacy,” Hayes says. He insists the board wants to reestablish a physical home for the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, even if it’s not yet clear what form that will take. “What we’re trying to do is strengthen the foundation and make Tom’s legacy global, and we tried to do that while respecting Los Angeles and the house,” he says.

In August, after the board formally filed the letter with the attorney general of California, Dehner wrote to friends informing them that the situation with the board “has deteriorated such that there is no longer any communication between me and the Foundation.” Tom’s papers — and the foundation’s collection of Kirwan, Cocteau, and Mapplethorpe — remain at the house in Echo Park, where Dehner still hosts artists despite the board’s cancellation of the artist-in-residency program. They pay him rent and plan on showing their work there in the coming months.

Tom House is quiet these days. There are no regular tours and the one remaining full-time staff member, the social media manager, works remotely. No one’s cruising the Pleasure Park anymore. Dehner and Sharp still live in the master bedroom on the second floor, and Loyalty is in his crawl space. When we spoke in October, Dehner was plugging away on his book about Tom, though he was reluctant to share the title because he was afraid someone would steal it. Even if he isn’t able to wrest back control of the foundation from the board, he plans to partner with other nonprofits to continue programming. He’s not retiring or going anywhere, that much is certain. He tells me that Tom, right before he died, warned him that running the foundation might take a toll. “If it gets too difficult, just walk away,” Tom advised. Dehner disagreed. “I’ve been through turbulent times here before. I could never walk away,” he says.