Tom's first childhood love was a young, sturdy day laborer who worked in the fields near his home. Finland is a land of robust men who fish in the icy sea, chop wood in endless forests, and thresh oats, rye, and barley on farms. Tom, a more sensitive boy, admired these rough men with their characteristic attire, designed to offer them protection and comfort. Later, he would say: “When I was young, leather was worn by people who worked outdoors because it kept you very warm. All those men who wore leather were the kind of men I adored.”

When he began drawing, he paid tribute to these youth idols by enhancing their wardrobe with tight jeans, faded t-shirts, and tall narrow-toed Lapland boots. In fact, it was a young lumberjack wearing this outfit on the cover of Physique Pictorial who introduced Tom to the world in the spring of 1957. In the following decades, the artist added truckers, mechanics, construction workers, circus strongmen, and typical American cowboys to his selection of working-class heroes. Although they were only sexual fantasies for him, his depiction of these working-class lovers helped working-class gays accept themselves.

The Little Book of Tom: Blue Collar captures Tom’s fascination with laborers in a compact and affordable volume. A wide selection of comic strips, drawings, and full-page illustrations, accompanied by archival and contextual material including frames and posters from historic films, personal photographs of Tom, sketches, and the images that inspired the artist.