Tom was a very creative letter writer.
He was writing to Felix Jones
his friend here in London.
This is in the 60s.
Tom had visited London several times
and he was really digging the whole
underground leather scene back then
and Tom was one of the active arms
in the creating the look of the gay leather men.
When he discovered Marlon Brando
and the look of the American black leather jacket
in the early, it was like 1953
he just was blown away.
And he started drawing
everything that was previously in brown or woollens
and he made them into black leather
so there were motorcycle leather jodhpurs
and an officers cap and things like this.
So you understand that London was bursting,
it was this growing organic cultural thing
within the subculture,
the underground culture of gay life.
And he said Dear Felix
it's really hard for me to tell you this,
but I'm afraid that I can not move to London
and become Tom of London.
Because the mail customs
are so intrusive within Great Britain
that I'd never be able to continue my cottage business
of selling prints and selling my originals
through my contacts through the mail,
and so alas I'm gonna have to stay here in Finland.
He became world famous before the internet existed.
Back then, what had to happen is that
everything had to reside inside
of an envelope, the size of an air mail envelope,
so he had to make his own photo development.
And he also could not send,
I mean he could send an original piece
but very rarely would he ever do that
because they would open it in most countries.
So he had to make these catalogues
of all of the different images
that guys would order from
and they would order, "I'll take A4 and D5"
and he would then have to make a print
that big of that particular drawing
and he had like maybe 30 or 40 different drawings
that people could pick from
and then they would send him money from their country,
so can you imagine the amount of different currencies
that he would actually have to process.
The remaining thing
that we have at the foundation
which is sort of a telltale of that,
and he never told me what it was,
but it all came to pass,
we have a plastic bag that is full of stamps
that is the size of a beach ball,
so imagine this big,
Filled with cancelled stamps from all over the world
and those were the one thing he kept.
So whenever he would get correspondence
he would tear off the stamp and keep it.
And he would dispose of all of the correspondents.
This is probably one of the things
if I could ever want to hang him, I would
because he destroyed all letters
from anyone who wrote him
because he felt it
was an infringement upon their privacy
and he came from a generation where
this kind of thing could actually be very incriminating
so he felt it his obligation and responsibility
to dispose of that.
He really got rid of everything
so what we have are his letters
to me, to Felix Jones, to other people
who have actually saved their letters
and then turned them over to the foundation,
so they have been a lot of the backstory of that.