Some call Bob Mizer a forerunner of Robert Mapplethorpe, but he was just as much the gay Hugh Hefner—a tireless collector of physical specimens.
It’s 1946. You’re a young guy, good-looking, roaming Los Angeles with one thing on the brain—no, notthing. You just want to be admired, hopefully on the big screen. For now, there’s Muscle Beach, by the Santa Monica pier, where you lift rusty dumbbells with bikini-clad men like Malcolm Brenner, a.k.a. “The Pacific Coast Hercules,” and Joe Gold, the future founder of Gold’s Gym.
Mizer came out to his mother in the thirties, when he was a teen-ager, refusing to ask a date to the prom and taking up nude sunbathing on the garage roof. His notion of gayness was informed by a “Code of Behavior” that he recorded in his high-school diary: “More masculine at all times.” Among his models were the gay and the straight, professional bodybuilders and professional beach bums, college students and returnees from the European front.
By the time Mizer died, in 1992, at the age of seventy, he had produced more than a million negatives and some three thousand hours of film and video. He has been called a forerunner of Robert Mapplethorpe, with his high-contrast, often black-and-white renderings of the body’s architecture. But there’s just as much reason to consider Mizer the gay Hugh Hefner—a tireless collector of physical specimens.
There was pleasure built into Mizer’s obsession, but also politics. In 1951, he founded what is generally considered the country’s original gay magazine,, and would continue publishing it for nearly four decades**.** In the magazine’s early years he included no explicit references to gay identity, though he authored coded editorials against the hypocrisies of the straight world. “Let us hope . . .
In Mizer’s high-school diary, he had envisioned a future self who would be “called crazy by some, brilliant by others, but at least is talked about once in a while.” In the fifties, with models showing up unbidden at the compound, he began skipping his visits to Muscle Beach; a string of copycat magazines emerged, with titles like
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