Pete Hegseth Is Obsessed With Tom Of Finland… Says Congresswoman, And She Has A Point
A US congresswoman has said out loud what plenty of gay men were already thinking. War Secretary Pete Hegseth, with his square jaw, tight uniforms and fixation on military manliness, looks like he walked straight out of a Tom Of Finland drawing. Vermont Representative Becca Balint made the comparison this week, and the resemblance does a lot of the work for her.
Balint was reacting to Hegseth’s latest idea, a plan for annual testosterone screening for troops aged 30 and over, sold as part of a “High-T” force. “I think it is indicative of the fact that there are so many people in this administration that have some weird, intense, homoerotic feelings towards men while also being incredibly homophobic,” she said in a video posted to MeidasTouch on 16 July.
The Tom Of Finland Of It All
Tom of Finland was the Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen, whose drawings of broad-shouldered, uniformed, impossibly built men became some of the most recognisable gay erotica of the 20th century. Cops, sailors, bikers, Marines. Balint thinks Hegseth fits right in. “Pete Hegseth is the embodiment of that,” she said.
Her sharper point was about the hypocrisy. “I don’t think the homoeroticism is the weird part,” she said. “The weird part is that they pretend that that’s not what it’s about.”
About Those Operation Names
Then there are the code names. Hegseth’s Pentagon has rolled out a run of operations that read like titles of gay adult videos: Operation Midnight Hammer (Iran), Operation Rough Rider (Yemen), Operation Southern Spear (boat strikes across the Caribbean and Pacific). We ran through the full thirsty list back in November. So who’s naming these?
The contradiction is the whole story. This is an administration that has moved to push transgender people out of the military and wind back gender-affirming care, while its top man builds his brand on the sweaty, uniformed masculinity that gay artists have been drawing, and desiring, for decades.
At DNA, we just enjoy that the Pentagon keeps handing us the material.
