Moomin (or Muumi) are very popular in Finland. It is a Finnish creation after all, more precisely the work of Tove Jansson. On top of a museum in Tampere and some permanent exhibitions at various museums, there’s always a temporary exhibition about Jansson and/or Moomin going on somewhere.

So, last October I was at one at the Architecture and Design Museum in Helsinki. It was called Escape to Moominvalley. One of the sections was about Jansson’s summer cottage, which was very important to her for a very obvious reason: She was a lesbian in a time when that was not even legal in Finland, so she and her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, built their own small cottage on a small island in the middle of the sea to escape and to get privacy. These days this is widely known and understood.

Except that the exhibition doesn’t really acknowledge this. It just goes with the excuse the couple used: They needed a place to work in peace.

I get that Moomin is popular among kids, so they wanted to be coy about this, but how hard is it to tell kids that two women or two men can love each other? You don’t have to go into the details. I mean, if you tell a kid that Zendaya and Tom Holland are a couple, you don’t expect to have to explain the mechanics of those two having sex. Why would you need to tell them anything like that regarding Tove and Tuulikki?

This aspect wasn’t completely erased though. There is an accompanying website: Rainbow Path, but you need to find that on your own. There are small QR-codes around the area, but they are easy to miss (considering there were at least 7 and I only saw 2).

Actually, that page is kind of interesting view on what people were ready to do to live their queer lives. Jansson’s relationship with Pietilä was actually an open secret, but they did go to weird lengths to hide it, even from their relatives.

Also, it should be noted that there is a lot of erasure of this kind in history. Here these two were depicted as colleagues, but in other cases they were often just friends. Like Emily Dickinson, who once told her sister-in-law that she was always looking forward to letters from her, as she wanted to taste her saliva from the envelope. And they are often called just gal pals.

I feel we shouldn’t be secretive about this. If I was queer, I would have been happy to have role models. One of the best known artists in Finland would have been a good start. Also, one should note that the other internationally known artist from Finland, Tom of Finland, was also gay as fuck and was actually known specifically for that, although he also hid it and his work was under a pseudonym. I do remember that it was known when he died, but he managed to keep his identity secret for much of his career.