Yet Another Edition Of "You Can't Make This Shit Up"

Finland’s Postal Service Debuts Its New Line of Homoerotic Stamps…

Via WaPo:
For the cost of mailing a letter, you can be the proud owner of a piece of miniature homoerotica.
If you’re in Finland, that is.
That’s because Itella, the Finnish postal service, is releasing commemorative stamps featuring the art of Tom of Finland, or Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991). Laaksonen remains a towering and iconic figure in the gay art scene. His sketches, often explicit, were unapologetic depictions of gay sex and relationships. Laaksonen’s subjects were almost always muscle-bound, handsome figures, often bursting out of their clothes. His work, a meditation on masculinity, was also heavy on leather fetish imagery. It’s a pretty risque sheet of stamps, which will feature 33 different designs based on Laaksonen’s work. They even include a little exposed booty, but nothing hardcore.
“Of course, the choice was discussed, but we wanted to live in the year 2014,” Itella development director Markku Penttinen told the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.
Laaksonen’s art is part of a number of public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.
“The sheet (of stamps) portrays a sensual life force and being proud of oneself,” said graphic designer Timo Berry, who selected the work that will be printed on stamps released this fall. “There is never too much of that in this northern country.”
Keep reading…

"In other news, Barney Frank heading to Finland for some vacation time next week. Yeah, that's
what you want to have your kids see when you tell them to bring in the mail. Sending a letter to grandmother will never be the same. Maybe we should look at it as more a political than homoerotic stamp with the 'cop' symbolizing the Obowel Regime and the naked 'slave' at his feet is the American People, right? And Just think, we wasted our blood and treasure saving these perverts from the Germans and the Soviet Union." MC