Author(s): Edited by Dian Hanson, Photographs by Bob Miser

Photography

This title discusses the kingdom of Bob. It deals with the little known color work of AMG's Bob Mizer. Bob Mizer famously spent 48 years making photos and films for his Athletic Model Guild, and 41 years publishing Physique Pictorial, America's first, and most explicitly gay, physique magazine. His diaries, kept from the age of eight, make it clear that he was openly homosexual from his late teens, but until the age of 42 he lived and worked in his mother's Los Angeles rooming house, where his strict code of ethics prevented him from fully expressing his fantasies. Therefore, for the first 24 years of his career he worked in black and white and was careful to never show a man fully nude, but following his mother's death in 1964 Mizer rapidly built a kingdom dedicated to the pleasures of male flesh, where he photographed entirely nude men in psychedelically saturated color.