For four decades, the Tom of Finland House in Los Angeles has served as both a repository of the legacy of the iconic gay Scandinavian erotic artist and as a hub for hundreds of queer erotic artists from around the world who followed in his footsteps. But between June and October, the Tom of Finland Foundation, which maintained the house, abruptly cancelled all of its programming, laid off all of its staff and announced surprise plans to relocate the collection, with some fearing they plan to take it all 2,000 miles away to New York City.

These developments have left artists angered and confused, particularly as the board of the foundation has remained tight-lipped about its decision-making. But it comes following years of controversies over allegations of financial mismanagement, disagreements over Tom’s legacy, a rivalry between art scenes on America’s east and west coasts and a scandal involving Nazi regalia.

Tom of Finland was the pseudonym used by artist Touko Laaksonen, whose drawings of hypermasculine and hypersexualized men from the 1950s to his death in 1991 were highly influential in the development of gay culture and mainstreaming of queer art. Works of Tom’s that were originally relegated to beefcake magazines and an underground mail-order business now hang in galleries across the globe, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Tom moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s, and from 1980 to 1990 lived with his partner Durk Dehner in the sprawling 14-room California Craftsman house in Echo Park that’s now affectionately known as Tom House. Dehner still lives in the house today, though the majority of the building is used as an archive for Tom’s collection and as artists’ studios.

Together with Dehner, in 1984 Tom established the Tom of Finland Foundation, a charitable organization devoted to preserving his own art and generally fostering and promoting queer erotic art.

In addition to Tom’s own work, he and Dehner acquired thousands of pieces of art, including works from notable queer artists like John Waters and Robert Mapplethorpe. In recognition of Tom’s contribution to the arts, the City of Los Angeles designated the Tom of Finland House as a historic-cultural monument in 2016.

Beyond the art collections, Tom House is also an archive of thousands of artifacts documenting 20th-century gay history. Among the many items in the collection are records of Tom’s mail-order business that show he had collectors in places as far-flung as Iran and South Africa.

Until recently, the foundation also ran tours of the house, art workshops, markets and an annual erotic art and culture festival. It also hosted artists from around the world in coveted residencies at the house.

All of that came to an end in June. The foundation stopped paying rent to Dehner for its use of Tom House and laid off all of its staff.

According to a statement on the Tom of Finland Foundation website, the foundation fell behind on payments because “the timing of incoming funds lagged behind the Foundation’s scheduled obligations.”

Dehner then attempted to serve an eviction notice on the foundation. He says he resorted to that step because the foundation had stopped returning his messages, and that was the only way he could find out what was going on. In the end, no eviction notice was actually served.

“What we were attempting to do was to get them to come to the table and to discuss what was going on, because they had not had any communication with me at all about not paying rent, utilities, off-site storage. We’ve never had that conversation,” Dehner tells Xtra.

In the meantime, all of the foundation’s programs were suddenly terminated with little or no notice given to the artists involved.

Georg Meyer-Wiel is a German erotic artist who’s based in London. He came to Los Angeles in July for a scheduled residency at Tom House, only to find out on arrival that all the programming to support it—workshops, meetings, publicity—was cancelled.

“This residency cost me a lot of money,” says Meyer-Wiel. “I spent nearly $20,000 to be there and I’ve gotten nothing out of these shitters because they cancelled everything. There was no promotion, there was nothing. Not even an apology.”

Francesco Brunetti, an Italian artist also based in London, was only told two weeks before his residency was to begin in September that it was being cancelled altogether.

“This was a huge deal. I made a whole plan, even with my company in the U.K. I had to ask for a sabbatical, all the arrangements with the apartment I rent in London,” Brunetti says.

After he received notice of the cancellation, Brunetti spoke with Dehner directly, and Dehner invited him to complete the residency at Tom House without the foundation’s participation.

“I still came here because I spoke with Durk and he explained the situation to me, and he said that I could still do this because it means a lot to me,” he says.

“It is horrible what happened. You don’t treat people like that.”

More than 40 former artists-in-residence at Tom House published an open letter calling for immediate transparency from the foundation’s board regarding its finances and long-term plans.

“For those of us who have lived and worked at Tom House, the residency was never simply accommodation or studio time,” reads the letter. “Its uniqueness came from the extraordinary combination of a historic place, Tom’s work and archives, the people who have preserved that history, and contemporary artists invited to engage with it. Preserving the residency therefore means preserving this relationship.” Dozens of artists have also posted letters to the board at savetomhouse.info, a site created by Dehner.

So far, the board has only issued one statement on the matter, published to its recently overhauled website.

The statement confirms that the board is severing ties with Tom House after 40 years.

“After careful consideration, we have concluded that the Foundation can no longer responsibly operate as a resident organization at Mr. Dehner’s home. To keep the collection safe and properly preserved, we are moving it to a professional art storage facility. This move is already underway,” the statement says.

“As a result, the Artist-in-Residence program is pausing. For more than 15 years, it has supported artists and enriched the local community, and we know this pause is a real loss. We apologize for any inconvenience this decision may cause. The Board is now exploring new ways to support artists, including grants, exhibitions, and residency opportunities that carry the program’s spirit forward.”

But the board hasn’t answered further questions from artists about the state of the foundation’s finances and how it intends to rebuild the organization outside of Tom House.

Xtra Magazine attempted to contact each of the members of the board several times via email and phone; no messages were returned.

Though Dehner helped found the organization and still lives in Tom House today, his relationship to the Tom of Finland Foundation was severed in January 2025, when photos circulated of him attending multiple fetish events wearing Nazi regalia, including a leather cap with a Nazi crest, iron-cross pins and necklaces and a swastika button.

Dehner became the subject of international criticism, was removed as a judge from the International Mr. Leather competition, and says he was pressured to resign from the board of the Tom of Finland Foundation and from his paid work with the organization.

Dehner vehemently denies that he is racist or supports Nazism and says that the items he wore in the photos were a type of role play and subversion that was common for men his age. Much of Tom’s early work was inspired by the German soldiers whom he fought alongside to defend Finland from the invading Russians in the Second World War, and the leather iconography his drawings are famous for was directly inspired by Nazi uniforms.

“The whole Nazi philosophy, the racism and all that, is hateful to me, but of course, I drew them anyway,” Tom is quoted as having said in F. Valentine Hooven’s official biography, Tom of Finland: The Official Life and Work of a Gay Hero. “They had the sexiest uniforms.” Nevertheless, once he was off the board, Dehner says the power in the organization began to shift. After Dehner’s controversy, a wave of resignations and retirements left vacancies that were never filled, and the board was reduced to a rump of five members, all of whom are based in New York.

Dehner says the board has failed in its main task to fund the organization and the remaining members show little interest in the foundation’s work on the west coast.

In February, the foundation presented an exhibition of work by 30 past artists-in-residence in a park in West Hollywood. Dehner says that although two board members were in the city at the time, neither attended the event.

Dehner says what money does come in has been wasted on legal fees and PR. The board has told him that it will only communicate with him via lawyers, and he says he’s spent close to US $20,000 on his own legal fees just to communicate with the board.

He worries that with no money coming in, the foundation may resort to selling parts of Tom’s collection that are already in its possession.

For his part, Dehner has already begun to sell artwork from his personal collection to support himself and keep up with required maintenance on the Tom of Finland House. He says he recently sold an original piece he bought at Tom’s first exhibition in Los Angeles to pay for a new roof for the house.

And the future of Tom House remains unsettled. Dehner, who’s now 77, says he had always planned to leave the house and its contents to the foundation after he died. Now he speculates that the foundation wants to sever its ties to the city Tom called home altogether.

“I thought I would pass and everything that was mine would be theirs. But they don’t want it. They want to separate and move whatever they want to New York and set up shop there,” Dehner says. “It’s not what Tom would have wanted. He wanted a community. He wanted the foundation to inspire others to be creative and express themselves without limitation.”

Dehner says he’s still hopeful that pressure from the community can bring about new leadership to the foundation that will keep it under his roof.

“I have not given up hope that through public reaction, we can actually regain control of this, and that we can give [the board] a way to remove themselves and replace them with a group of passionate individuals who actually are artists that care about this facility.”