The Life In His Men

Mizer's first model, Forrester Millard 

My friend and former co-worker Dian Hanson (pictured), she of The Big Penis Book infamy, is still documenting penises, this time the quaint, often flaccid ones attached to game trade shot by the late, legendary beefcake photographer Bob Mizer. Bob's World: The Life and Boys of AMG's Bob Mizer (Taschen, $59.99) is an oversized hardcover of the variety Taschen's famous for that sports nearly 300 pages and an excellent supplemental DVD filled with Mizer's at times innocent, at times seedy images documenting one gay man's power to persuade and underpay an army of sexually available guys to act out his own personal fantasies of masculinity, domination and exhibitionism.

I wonder if he had an "agreeable personality"? 

Mizer (pictured, who died in 1992) was one-of-a-kind—able to make a living from his various fetishes, he used his mother as his business partner and diaried most aspects of his life. Even his models were exhaustively catalogued, using a cryptic code, reproduced and translated in the book, whose symbols pretended to stand for things like "agreeable personality" or "petty  thief," but which really stood for things like "can be fucked + v. good fuck," "on dope" and "will suck cock."

Mizer's compound—illustrated by a fascinating aerial photograph taken during police surveillance in the early '60s—was sort of a precursor to Neverland with its numerous studios, its pool (the scene of unimaginable action over the years) and its collection of monkeys. This kind of intimate info is what distinguishes the book from a simple overview of Mizer's photography. I found the imagery almost (but not quite) secondary to the amazing memorabilia reproduced (Hanson had unfettered access to all of Mizer's personal effects), such as pages from his childhood and adult diaries, flyers and pictures of Bob with early boyfriends, and the lovingly conducted interviews with luminaries such as David Hockney, David "Old Reliable" Hurles, Mizer's heir Wayne Stanley, artist Jack Pierson and others.

I find Mizer's photography to be much more varied than that of some other beefcake photographers. He definitely had a guileless point-and-shoot style, and yet there is a world of difference between his early, clean black-and-white shots of beautiful models like 19-year-old Joe Dallesandro (pictured), and his eventual garishly colorful shots of shiny-bodied drifters whose primary talents seemed to dangle between their legs.

Nothing less than an oral history of gay desire, self-indulgence, ingenuity and creativity in the 20th Century, Bob's World is our world—and welcome to it.