Kake (Finnish pronunciation roughly “KAH-keh,” [ˈkɑke]) is the signature gay leatherman created by Tom of Finland—the working name of Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen. Hypermasculine, heavily muscled, extravagantly endowed, and cheerfully promiscuous, Kake headlines a twenty-six-issue erotic comic series published from 1968 to 1986. Laaksonen had drawn leathermen since the 1950s, but Kake was his first ongoing title sold as self-contained comic books rather than mail-order panel sets excerpted in the physique magazine Physique Pictorial.
The series moved from Danish publisher DFT to Sweden’s Revolt Press in 1971 and to the Tom of Finland Company in 1982. Those leathermen illustrations—with Kake as the friendly, mustached face of the whole aesthetic—helped set the visual default of gay leather culture worldwide. Critics have called him Laaksonen’s “most iconic character” and “the gay world’s most familiar pin-up icon.” For readers who live in leather, gear, and power-exchange scenes, Kake is still the smiling proof that hypermasculine SM style could be joyful propaganda rather than only menace.
Characterization: Muscle, Leather, and Switchable Fun
Kake is idealized muscle and cock, usually mustachioed, dressed in biker leather: jacket, breeches, knee-high riding boots, peaked cap. He also cycles through other fetish uniforms—policeman, mechanic, and similar archetypes that fixate the eye on authority, grease, and street toughness. Personality matters as much as gear. He is friendly and easygoing, a deliberate contrast to straight media’s “dangerous leatherman,” and he has sex often, in the spirit of 1960s–70s sexual liberation rather than as a grim hunt.
When stories touch BDSM or rape-fetish scenarios, writer F. Valentine Hooven III notes that Kake’s sadism reads as “innocent fun,” and partners are welcome to reverse roles. That switchability is central: the comics do not freeze Kake forever as top or bottom. A typical issue is about twenty full-page panels, told mostly without dialogue. Kake meets one or more equally built men—sailors, lumberjacks, cowboys, policemen, businessmen—in parks, public toilets, workplaces, or open roads. Sparse English dialogue appears as exclamations or environmental text (signs, graffiti, incidental writing). The silence keeps the focus on body, gear, and choreography of the encounter.
Editor Dian Hanson has described Kake as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed” of liberated, mutually satisfying, explicitly drawn gay sex: a man on a motorcycle who spreads the idea that men can fuck proudly, kiss and caress as well as penetrate, and still look like the fantasy of masculine strength. Laaksonen’s stated goal was simple and radical for its time: “proud men who were happy having sex.”
Context: From Private Panels to Explicit Print
Laaksonen began drawing multi-panel stories in 1946 as personal projects and gifts for friends, and he drew leathermen as early as the 1950s. He did not submit comics for publication until the 1960s. His first published comic, The Tattooed Sailor, appeared in the August 1961 issue of Physique Pictorial, a magazine that had already begun printing his illustrations in 1957. Early published work was suggestively homoerotic rather than fully explicit; as censorship laws loosened late in the 1960s, sex on the page became overt.
Those early comics were one-shots. By 1965 Laaksonen experimented with recurring characters—first a figure named Mike, later a Tarzan-inspired character named Jack—before the market and the Danish commission that produced Kake as an ongoing series. The prior business model for his comics in Physique Pictorial had been partial magazine excerpts with the full story sold separately by mail order as a set of five to fifteen printed panels (often priced around USD $1.50 per page). Kake broke that mold: discrete comic books a reader could buy and keep as a run.
Production: Photo Reference, Eero, and the Name “Kake”
DFT’s Michael Holm, who oversaw gay pornography publishing at the Danish house, commissioned the ongoing series in the late 1960s. Interiors were black line art; covers were detailed pencil drawings chosen for cheap, clean reproduction. Laaksonen used photo reference constantly, often models he photographed himself—friends or amateurs in uniform or held poses. Kake’s look drew on a northern Finnish man named Eero whom Laaksonen met while visiting Stockholm. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Eero regularly traveled to Helsinki to pose as reference for the character.
The name “Kake” carries butch Finnish nickname energy comparable to English “Butch.” It was also the name of one of the artist’s friends. The double resonance—slang toughness plus personal circle—fit a character meant to feel both archetypal and approachable.
Publication History: DFT, Revolt, Coq, and Tom of Finland Company
Kake: The Intruder (1968) opened the run under DFT. Laaksonen felt underpaid and disliked losing ownership of original art. When Holm founded Revolt Press in Sweden in 1970, he offered a higher page rate and full ownership of originals; Laaksonen accepted, and Kake moved to Revolt in 1971. That same year the Danish house Coq also printed issues. Parallel and overlapping printings in the underground market make exact edition histories messy—one reason later sales figures are so hard to pin down.
In 1979 Laaksonen and Durk Dehner founded the Tom of Finland Company, a mail-order business that became the sole publisher of Kake and related merchandise and art books. Kake in the Wild West (1982) was the company’s first book and sold out its initial print run. A premium second edition with larger pages, better paper, and a “Tom’s Archives” section of archival illustrations also sold out, prompting deluxe reissues of earlier stories that had reverted to Laaksonen’s ownership. The final comic, Oversexed Office, appeared in 1986. Emphysema diagnosed in 1988 left Laaksonen with a hand tremor that restricted drawing; he died in 1991.
Taschen anthologized the complete run as The Complete Kake Comics in 2008. Most original art is now with the Tom of Finland Foundation and preserved in the organization’s archive. Exact global sales figures remain muddy because unauthorized reprints and photocopied editions flooded the market for decades. Hooven estimated that twenty percent or more of Tom-related books produced between 1950 and 1979 were created without the artist’s consent—some from unreturned original artwork held by publishers, others from outright photocopy piracy of authorized editions.
What a Typical Kake Story Does
Structurally, an issue is a short erotic film in ink. The setup is often a location that already carries sexual charge for gay male culture of the era: a restroom, a park after dark, a worksite, a roadside, an office after hours. The men Kake meets are types—sailor, cop, cowboy, lumberjack—because the comics are interested in the erotics of role as much as individual psychology. Gear and setting do narrative work that dialogue would do in a prose story.
When BDSM appears—restraint, rough handling, hierarchical play—it is framed inside the series’ overall cheerfulness. The point is not trauma theater. It is mutual heat that can include power games without trapping either partner in permanent victimhood. That is one reason leather readers still claim Kake: the comics model intensity without shame and role-play without permanent degradation as the only available script.
Reception and Cultural Impact
Edward Lucie-Smith argued that Tom’s masculine gay men “altered the way gay men think about themselves,” elaborating a dress-and-body type against effeminate stereotypes. The leather biker already existed in both gay and straight culture—Laaksonen cited Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) as a direct influence—but Hooven holds that “the leatherman as drawn by Tom of Finland” became the gay community’s gold standard. Kake, as the recurring star of a multi-decade comic run, fixed that standard in sequential form rather than only in single pin-ups.
Susanna Paasonen has called Kake Laaksonen’s most iconic character; Hooven called him the gay world’s most familiar pin-up. Hanson’s “Johnny Appleseed” metaphor stresses circulation: comics travel, get passed hand to hand, get photocopied, get taped to locker doors and bedroom walls. The unauthorized editions that hurt the artist commercially also, paradoxically, helped make the look ubiquitous in pre-internet leather networks.
Affection on the page mattered as political aesthetics. Characters who kiss and caress, who switch active and passive roles, and who look happy while doing so, pushed against both mainstream homophobia and internalized scripts that treated gay sex as tragic or furtive. For BDSM and leather history, Kake is not a technical bondage manual; he is the mass-image engine that made caps, boots, and chest harnesses read as erotic home rather than costume joke.
Screen and Stage Afterlives
Kake appears in the 2017 biopic Tom of Finland, portrayed by Niklas Hogner, and in Tom of Finland, The Musical, first staged by Turku City Theatre in 2017. Those adaptations introduce the character to audiences who may never have held a 1970s underground comic, folding him into national cultural memory in Finland and into international queer film circuits.
Why Kake Still Matters on a BDSM and Leather Site
Strip away nostalgia and the comics still do three things kink culture cares about. First, they eroticize gear—leather, uniforms, boots—as the main event, not an accessory to “regular” sex. Second, they treat power play as compatible with warmth, humor, and role reversal. Third, they prove that underground sequential art can invent a body ideal that real people then dress themselves into at bars, contests, and pride marches.
Laaksonen’s line is clean, the bodies impossible, the mood often sunny even when the acts are filthy. That combination—hyperbole plus friendliness—is the Kake formula. Between The Intruder in 1968 and Oversexed Office in 1986, across DFT, Revolt, Coq, and the Tom of Finland Company, the series built a portable mythology of the gay leatherman as someone you might want to meet, fuck, switch with, and wave to on a motorcycle afterward. Unauthorized reprints, foundation archives, Taschen bricks, film, and musical theater have kept the mustache in circulation. For leather and SM aesthetics, Kake remains the grinning, peaked-cap argument that hypermasculine fantasy can be mutual, explicit, and proud.
Collectors hunting the run still work through original underground issues, later company reissues, and The Complete Kake Comics. Scholars of gay visual culture treat the series as primary evidence of how post-Stonewall (and pre-Stonewall underground) desire taught itself a look. Scene veterans simply recognize him: the man in the drawing who looks like the man at the bar who looks like the drawing again—a feedback loop Tom of Finland and Kake locked into place for good.
