It was a year of contradictions. We celebrated his liberation while mourning the loss of his underground edge. We adored his masculine power while questioning its limitations. We watched a generation embrace his aesthetic while forgetting the blood, sweat, and police raids that made it necessary.

For decades, Tom was the secret prince of the underground. His hyper-muscular, impossibly well-endowed men in tight leather and polished boots were the fantasy fuel of a closeted generation. But 2017 marked a distinct turning point: the year the underground icon was officially anointed into the mainstream canon, sparking a global debate about art, pornography, masculinity, and liberation.

For many older gay men watching this happen in real-time in 2017, the feeling was one of vertigo. They remembered the days when buying a Tom of Finland calendar meant going to a grimy adult bookstore and paying in cash to avoid a paper trail. Now, a teenager in Idaho could buy a Tom of Finland phone case from Amazon in two clicks. Finally, no review of Tom of Finland in 2017 is complete without mentioning the digital revolution. In 2017, the official Tom of Finland Foundation launched a massive digital archival project. High-resolution scans of thousands of drawings, many never seen before, were uploaded to the internet.

By bringing this story to international multiplexes (and later to streaming services), 2017 introduced Tom of Finland to a generation of queer kids who had never seen a physical copy of Daddy or Physique Pictorial . For them, he wasn't a dirty secret—he was a folk hero. However, not everyone in 2017 was celebrating. The rise of Tom of Finland in the mainstream also ignited the fiercest internal critique of his legacy.