MIZER, Robert

MIZER, Robert (b. 27 March 1922; d. 12 May 1992), photographer, filmmaker, publisher.

Robert Mizer was among the most prolific and influential of the artists who advanced male physique photography during the middle years of the twentieth century. Mizer was born in Haley, Idaho, in 1922 and moved to Los Angeles as an infant with his widowed mother. He took up photography as a hobby while a teenager and would photograph bodybuilders on his frequent visits to "Muscle Beach" in Venice. In 1945, at the age of twenty-three, he founded the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), a studio dedicated to celebrating youthful male beauty. Working out of his childhood home, he photographed thousands of models between 1945 and 1992. Mail order sales of still photos supplied Mizer's income. In order to promote those sales he published, beginning in 1951, the magazine Physique Pictorial. Doubling as a catalog, his magazine was widely distributed in the United States and endured far beyond the heyday of physique photography, continuing until 1990. Starting in 1958 Mizer also produced hundreds of short homoerotic films, which he marketed through Physique Pictorial.

Mizer was one of dozens of photographers and entrepreneurs who in the years following World War II expanded the availability of homoerotic images for purchase through newsstands and mail order. Mizer pursued his work despite federal obscenity laws designed to prohibit the circulation of erotic material through the U.S. Postal Service. Earlier in the century Bernarr McFadden had successfully fended off federal charges that Physical Culture magazine was obscene by disavowing its potential for erotic interpretation and claiming that visual presentation of muscular strength inspired athleticism, good health, and solid moral character. Mizer's work built upon the legal disclaimers and visual codes of his prewar predecessors. Many of his photographs and films, whether of individuals, pairs, or groups, suggested athletic scenarios (wrestling was a particular favorite) and healthful recreation, often in forested or other natural settings. In addition, he posed models with props to suggest classical statuary, and he developed an aesthetic that, while often campy, laid claim to the artistic merits of the nude male. Athleticism and art provided Mizer and his peers with a line of defense against charges of obscenity, although this defense was tested by surveillance, intimidation, arrest, and prosecution.

Mizer was convicted and served time on an obscenity charge, but won his case on appeal. During the 1960s other physique publishers were similarly prosecuted and also won on appeal, so that by the end of the decade the federal courts effectively established the legal right to produce and sell erotic images of men in the United States. The modern pornography industry began to develop in earnest, offering full nudity and explicit sex acts. Mizer made some efforts to produce sexually explicit material, but for the most part he left this field to others and continued to produce innocent and playful boy-next-door scenarios, including fantasy scenes of bondage and discipline. Most of his models in the 1940s and 1950s were white, although in the 1970s African American and Latino models began to appear regularly in Physique Pictorial. In his magazine, Mizer would include editorial comments on contemporary issues alongside information about his models (name, age, hobbies, etc.). Mizer also inscribed next to many portraits an obscure symbol, which indicated his impressions of the model's personality traits.

Scholars Thomas Waugh and Christopher Nealon argue that Mizer and his peers definitively shaped the history of sexuality through their art. Purchase of physique photography from newsstands and through the mail allowed men not only to stimulate their personal erotic interest in male bodies, but also to know that similar desires were shared by a vast audience. In the years leading up to Stonewall, physique photography helped to create a sense of community through mass consumption. Mizer's films and photos encouraged allegiance to a collective sexual identity, although the predominance of white models limited by race the range of possible identifications and desires within that collective.

Mizer's place in history is secured by the sheer volume of his output (nearly one million print negatives and between one and three thousand short films), by the longevity of Physique Pictorial, and by his trademark aesthetic. Interest in Mizer's work revived in the 1990s shortly after his death in Los Angeles. The German publisher Taschen reprinted the entire run of Physique Pictorial, and Campfire Video assembled five volumes of his films for release on video. In 1999 Canadian director Thom Fitzgerald produced the film Beefcake, which imaginatively recreates the AMG Studio and celebrates the camp sensibility Mizer brought to male erotica in an age that, in retrospect, appears both more repressive and more innocent than the early twenty-first century.

Bibliography

Nealon, Christopher. "The Secret Public of Physique Culture." In Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001.

Stanley, Wayne. "Introduction." In The Complete Reprint of Physique Pictorial: 1951–1990. Cologne: Taschen, 1997.

Waugh, Thomas. "Strength and Stealth." In Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Greg Mullins

see alsophysique magazines and photographs; pornography; visual art:photography.