The Wonderful, Sexual World of Bob Mizer (NSFW)

By Billy Miller (Artist, curator and independent publisher; VP, Bob Mizer Foundation)

I first became aware of the work of photographer, filmmaker and independent publisher Bob Mizer (1922-1992) by chance one momentous spring afternoon in the late ’60s. I grew up in the ghetto of Detroit, and in the tenement where I lived, all but one of our windows faced an alley. On that afternoon, several of my junior high school buddies and I were hanging out in my room, and one of my pals spied the neighborhood’s “dirty old man” hiding something in a trashcan. My friends and I wanted to see what that was all about, so we went down, got the bag out and dumped the contents on the ground.

Out came a collection of homo porn of the ’60s variety (before “gay” would have been used to describe it), mainly those muscle boy chapbooks like Grecian Guild, VIM and, notably, Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial — along with a couple more hardcore magazines. This was the first time I’d ever seen anything like that. It was a revelation: My heart and mind were racing. My pals picked them up, flipped through the pages a bit, and started throwing them around and laughing; then, after a few minutes, they tired of it and headed off.

Although I left with them, I hurried back to investigate, stuffed as many as I could into the same paper bag, and went to the park and into the bushes, where I pored over them for a long time. I wanted to bring them home, but there was nowhere to hide them in the small apartment where we lived, so I stashed them in the bushes and returned the next day to study them again. And, man, did I ever study that stuff! When I came back the day after that, my stash had been discovered and was gone, but the memory of those images was the inspiration for many jerk-off sessions to follow.

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