Douglas Messerli | Physical Bodies: The Cinematic Work of Bob Mizer [introduction]

physical bodies: the cinematic work of bob mizer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Beginning in 1942, Robert Henry Mizer, better known as Bob Mizer, began to make photographs and films of musical male models, describing his work as representing body building and matters relating to the male physique. And by 1945 he had established his renowned Athletic Model Guild (AMG), that paid hundreds of young male amateurs, many of them over the years becoming movie stars or other celebrities, which he feature in his magazine Physique Pictorial. Over the years he made more than 3,000 short and feature films posing as works about muscular development but in fact quite clearly developing the US version, in a highly restricted era, of male gay porno pictures and films.

 

    In order to escape censorship—although he was targeted several times by governmental officials and imprisoned on at least two occasions—his models of the 1950s and 1960s wore small posing straps which hid their genitals while revealing everything else including their buttocks which were on heavy display throughout his works. Models spent a great deal of type posing as body builders, and in most of his early works the models were able to make physical contact only through wrestling and other forms of athletic like combat.

     Soon a substantial number of other photographs had begun creating such “beefcake” like photographs and movies, among them Alonzo Hanagan (Lon of New York), Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles), Douglas Juleff (Douglas of Detroit), Don Whitman of the Western Photograph Guild in Denver, Russ Warner in Oakland, and Dave Martin in San Francisco.

     For a hungry homosexual audience who could not easily get hold of the far more revealing male and boy pornography of Europe, Mizer and these other photographs (to whom Mizer often loaned out models) offered a kind of sanitized version of male images which, given the dearth of more revelatory material, helped to satisfy the sexual urges of thousands of gay and bisexual men during these decades. Only in the 1970s were Mizer and others able to show full male nudity, but even then he limited their sexual activity to kissing, wrestling, cuddling, and rubbing, generally refusing to permit his models to enter into full sexual acts. In a sense, it was a bit like burlesque, giving his audiences a big glimpse of what they desired without providing then with the actual sexual engagement, and some argue, it was all the more arousing for that very reason.

     His influence was immense, impacting noted artists such as Bruce Yonemoto, Karen Finley, and Vaginal Davis, all of whom wrote on his work, and even blue chips artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and David Hockney. Among his early models were Tab Hunter, Sal Mineo, Glenn Corbett, Dennis Cole, and Joe Dalessandro, among others. Some went on to become noted porn stars.

 

Los Angeles, July 20, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).