Legendary Children: The First Decade of RuPaul's Drag Race and the Last Century of Queer Life by Tom Fitzgerald & Lorenzo Marquez

Author:Tom Fitzgerald & Lorenzo Marquez
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2020-03-02T23:00:00+00:00

The Relentless Desire of Bob Mizer

In November 1951, three months after Charles Beach burned J. C. Leyendecker’s private papers after his funeral, a young gay photographer and fitness enthusiast (or at least supporter of other fitness enthusiasts) named Bob Mizer, having already formed the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), launched its accompanying magazine, Physique Pictorial, thereby birthing the modern physique magazine industry. With names like Physical Culture, The Young Physique, and Body Beautiful, physique mags featured young men in posing straps, briefs, or thongs, greased up and flexing in a variety of testosterone-fueled scenarios. Part of the reason gay, bi, and queer men fetishized the superfit to such an extent is because for the longest time, “physical culture” magazines were the only mainstream entry available into a life of admiring the naked male form. Obscenity laws of the midtwentieth century allowed for the distribution of imagery featuring naked women (hence Playboy, which launched to tremendous, culture-shifting success in 1953), but anything featuring naked men was illegal and extremely difficult to come by, and carried heavy penalties for anyone caught distributing it, not to mention deep shame for any male caught owning it. For a gay man in the 1950s and 1960s, these precursors to the men’s fitness magazines (and full-blown porn) of today were the best and sometimes only way for them to . . . express their queerness, let’s say.

“It is an assault to the dignity of man and his creator to treat any portion of the body as something shameful and disgusting,” Bob Mizer wrote in a Physique Pictorial editorial in 1965. In the magazine’s long run, Mizer suffered the slings and arrows of a society and legal system that constantly looked for ways to shut his burgeoning operation down, and he found himself facing obscenity charges and accusations of operating a prostitution ring more than once throughout his long career. But he remained deeply committed to the passion he developed going back to his boyhood: photographing as many beautiful men in as little clothing as he could possibly get away with. This was no mere fetish, but a life’s calling. Mizer could have happily taken as many nudie pictures of men as he liked and fulfilled his own desires, but he felt a need and a drive to fight for the right to display his desires, to reach out to other men with the same desires, and to form bonds with them. The Pit Crew, working their briefs and flexing their butts just like the physique models of yore, represent not just the history of queer male desire but how the need to express that desire helped form a community.

Mizer, for his part, literally formed a community. Buying up the properties surrounding his mother’s downtown Los Angeles home after she died in the early 1960s (and after she’d spent years supporting and aiding him in his semi-nude-modeling entrepreneurial efforts), Mizer secured a physique modeling compound around himself—a series of connected properties in which he lived and worked. He

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.