Photographer: Bob Mizer (Athletic Model Guild)

Robert Henry “Bob” Mizer (1922-1992) was born in Hailey, Idaho, in the Wood River Valley of the central part of the state. The winters are cold and snowy, with snow falling as late as May. The summers are hot during the day, but cool off into the 40s or 50s at night. While Mizer was a child, Hailey was still very much a frontier town.

From Bullion Street north on River Street was the Red Light District, where the prostitutes remained in business until 1942, when Sun Valley resort became a naval hospital, and they were not so politely asked to leave town. A local merchant was heard to lament, "There goes the mainstay of Hailey's business. They always paid in cash."

Sun Valley resort, Hailey, Idaho, c. 1930

In 1927, Mizer (age 5) and his mother, Delia, then a single mother, moved to Los Angeles, purchasing a house on West Eleventh Street, not far from MacArthur Park (then named Westlake Park). Los Angeles at the time was a rather sparse place little resembling the megalopolis it has become in more recent times. Mizer's life was largely unremarkable until adulthood, but he never lost the independent, frugal frontier mindset of his place of birth.

Mizer’s earliest physique photography appears in 1942, in both Kodachrome and monochrome. He started his company, the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), with two partners, in 1945, as a referral service for models; by 1947, his partners had left and through the sale of his pictures alone he was able to support his mother, Delia, and his older brother, Joe.

Mizer’s career was derailed in 1947 when he was convicted of the unlawful distribution of "obscene material" through the US mail. The material in question was a series of black and white photographs, taken by Mizer, of young bodybuilders wearing what were known as posing straps—a precursor to the G-string. He served a nine-month prison sentence at a work camp in Saugus, California for what now seems tame. At the time, the Comstock laws, passed in 1873 at the behest of zealous anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock, barred the sale of lewd material, including nude photographs, through the US mail; in California, state laws also made it a crime to possess such photos, even of oneself.

In spite of pressure from law enforcement, Mizer built a veritable empire on his physique photography and films. AMG went on to become the dominant physique photography studio until the end of the beefcake era, but by 1951, when he published the first issue of Physique Pictorial, Mizer was operating the studio on his own at his home near downtown Los Angeles. With assistance from his mother, Delia (who created the posing straps), and his older brother, Joe, Mizer photographed thousands of men, building a collection that includes nearly one million different images and thousands of films and videotapes.

In the 1950s, several other photographers were doing similar work, such as Alonzo James “Lon” Hanagan (Lon of New York) in New York City, Douglas Juleff (Douglas of Detroit) in Detroit, Don Whitman (Western Photography Guild) in Denver, and, on the West Coast, Bruce Bellas (Bruce of Los Angeles), Russell S. “Russ” Warner in Oakland and Dave Martin in San Francisco. Mizer both competed with and collaborated with other physique photographers, including Chuck Renslow (Kris Studio) in Chicago, who published a competing periodical, Mars, and John Barrington (Zodiac, JB Studio, JSB Studio, dP or JP Studio, Royale Studio) in London, who published a non-competing magazine, Male Model Monthly.

In 1954, Physique Pictorial drew the attention of ultra-conservative, shock columnist Paul Coates of the now-defunct Los Angeles Daily Mirror, calling it “a kind of Esquire for men who wish they weren’t” and “thinly veiled pornography.” Coates was also appearing on the Mirror's television station and radio station, both KTTV, presenting the content of his printed column. Vice officers soon raided the AMG studio and a case was taken to court which Mizer lost. But the decision of an Appellate Court overturned the earlier ruling and declared that “the male rump is not necessarily obscene.”

Mizer was also subjected to other types of harassment over the years. Rumors were circulated that he kept his models locked up in cages or that he was running a male house of prostitution. The falsity of these charges was easily apparent to anyone who visited the AMG complex. For the most part they were young men in their late teens or early twenties who have just been discharged from the service or who have just arrived in Los Angeles by thumb or by bus without a penny in their pockets. Long before the Gay Community Service Center was established on Wilshire, Bob Mizer was caring for, feeding, and photographing every young drifter coming through.

From 1963, Mizer began to classify the models in the pages of Physique Pictorial by adding a set of symbols he’d devised from astrology. He referred to this as “Subjective Character Analysis” and eventually offered to provide curious readers with a key that was two-tiered: The public chart indicated that the various tiny squiggles next to a model meant that he was a “typical man,” “closed minded,” and “strongly religious” or “aggressive. enthusiastic” and “very affable.” But a decoder uncovered after Mizer’s death shows the signs also denoted explicit information about the models’ sexual preferences and willingness to perform or receive sexual acts (along with unsparing commentary about things like the models’ intelligence and whether or not they were worth the trouble of photographing).

Bob Mizer and models

Throughout the 1960s, changes to the law of the land made by Roth v. United States (1957), MANual Enterprises, Inc. v. Day (1962), Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964). and Stanley v. Georgia (1969), decriminalized nudity and the male penis. At the same time, the cultural landscape of the United States was in upheaval, from Beatlemania to Haight-Ashbury to the Stonewall Riots, the moral bondage of the McCarthy/post-war era was being cast off. Mizer strove to keep up with the times, moving his production out of the studio and literally onto the rooftop.

Monte Hansen loop ad by W&B

Between 1965 and 1970, Sam Ratner operated Wyngate & Bevins, a publishing and film distribution company specializing in nudist content, from a Los Angeles address. During the roughly five years that Wyngate & Bevins was in operation, it produced material for heterosexual and homosexual markets. Its all-male content featured many of the same models used by Bob Mizer's Athletic Model Guild, and most, if not all, of the films and slide sets distributed under the Wyngate & Bevins trademark appear to have been shot on location at the Athletic Model Guild compound. Bob Mizer was always secretive about his life and business, so I have not been able to determine if there was a partnership between Mizer in Ratner, if Ratner was rebranding AMG content under a licensing agreement, or if Ratner was simply stealing AMG content and presenting it as his own. Ratner fell afoul of tax laws in 1970 and Wyngate & Bevins ceased operations until 1987, when two films (both obviously made in Mexico) were released under the W&B trademark. Working with Dick Falcon, Walter James Kundzicz was operating from Los Angeles during this same period as Sunshine Beach Club, so it is possible that they produced the W&B content.

Antonios Montez and Marco Fiorello

From about 1970, Mizer began filming in color on 16 mm film, which was terribly expensive at the time, transferring the archival footage onto 8 mm film on demand, which was the market standard for home viewing until the advent of cheap magnetic video tapes (Beta and VHS). Mizer's beefcake empire was in decline as successive waves of pornographers claimed more and more of the market, until his was a niche market driven more by nostalgia than salacious sexual appetite.

By the start of the 1980s, Mizer is still taking new photographs and making films direct to VHS. But his products were more appealing to connoisseurs of “rough trade” and his chief competition for that market share was his friend David Hurles (Old Reliable). Mizer was at the same time also continuing to do paid studio work of very high quality “vanity shots” for professional bodybuilders, actors, artists, and assorted others as it came his way.

In 1989, Mizer’s health faltered and began to slow him down. He’d developed kidney disease and needed to have dialysis three times a week, though he scheduled his appointments early enough to still allow nearly a full day in the studio. Sitting and standing became painful, so he photographed lying down on a kind of sled he’d made for himself. His last photo shoot took place about a month before he went into the hospital to await a kidney transplant. He died there before the operation could take place, on 12 May 1992, at age seventy.

After Mizer’s death in 1992, his studio was dismantled and his possessions, including a life-size portrait in oil of Rudolph Valentino and the many vaguely classical props and sets for his films, were dispersed. AMG still exists and from its vast archive sells photographs, as well as licensing them for reproduction. Dennis Bell and his team at the non-profit Bob Mizer Foundation work to keep Mizer’s memory current and to preserve the vast catalog of images and films he left behind, continuing the publication of Physique Pictorial and printing volumes of collected film, as well as new content from AMG Brazil.

Sources:

• Coates, Paul V. “Physique Book Chief Arraigned”. Los Angeles Daily Mirror, 19 May 1954.
• Coates, Paul V. “Well, Medium, and RARE”. Los Angeles Daily Mirror, 4 May 1954.
• Coates, Paul V. “Well, Medium, and RARE”. Los Angeles Daily Mirror, 18 May 1954.
• Cleere, Ford. “Protest Deluge of Smut Here”. Los Angeles Herald and Express, 21 Nov 1956.
• Davies, Joan; and Rowland, Frank. "History of the City of Hailey". The Hailey Historic Preservation Commission, undated, retrieved: 12 Dec 2018.
• Everleth, Mike. “Film Man’s Obscenity Conviction Reversed,” Los Angeles Times, 28 Feb 1959.
• Grace, Roger M. “Reminiscing - Paul Coates: Journalist”. Metropolitan News-Enterprise, 16 Jan 2003, retrieved: 12 Dec 2018.
• Hanson, Dian. Bob's World: The Life and Boys of AMG’s Bob Mizer. Köln: Taschen, 2009.
• Hanson, Dian, editor; Mizer, Robert Henry, photographer. Bob Mizer: AMG, 1000 Model Directory. Köln: Taschen, 2016.
• Lewis, Anthony. “Nudist Magazines Win Mail Rights”. New York Times, 14 Jan 1958.
• Padva, Gilad, editor. Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
• People v. Mizer (1954), Municipal Court Case File CR A 3216, Los Angeles County Record Center, Los Angeles, California.
• Wenger, Daniel. “The Obsessive Photographer Behind America's First Gay Magazine”. The New Yorker, 22 Sep 2016, retrieved: 12 Dec 2018.
• Wolff, Kate. “Beyond the Muscle”. East of Borneo, 2 Nov 2016, retreived: 10 Dec 2018.