As a educational archive, the Bob Mizer Foundation is supported by grants, donations and the contributions made by its devoted members. The Foundation's interns and volunteers are integral to helping us achieve our stated goal of promoting and preserving progressive and controversial photography.

Bob Mizer began taking photographs as early as 1942, first experimenting with self-portraits and later moving to the boardwalks of Venice beach to capture images of body building competitions. His early works, while not as polished or perfected as his later photographs, laid the groundwork for a career that would span 50 years.

From the time of his first foray into professional photography in 1945, with the establishment of the now infamous Athletic Model Guild, until his death in 1992, Bob Mizer focused his lens on the male form, drawing ire from the religious right, law enforcement, and even the federal government. The images he produced, while provocative at the time, were by no means explicit, but nonetheless lead to years of legal battles and a near half century of personal anguish.

Bobmizerfoundation.org was replaced for a few years by the cutely named website posingstrap.com, but now they have returned to bobmizer.org as their main website. It remains the largest collection of vintage, all-male photographs from the 1900s to the 1960s.

Many of the pictures they feature include jockstraps and pouches that the photographers had to use because of the legal issues in the states involving the mailing of male frontal nudity.

The websites have some rare content, the studio beefcake pics of nude musclemen, naked romps in the watering hole, rare gay erotica from the days doctors thought being gay was some sort of mental disease. These are the pics found in the back closets and attics of those family members who somehow never married!

They come from the days when gay mags had to pretend they were all about body and muscle-building and had names like Physique Pictorial and Physical Culture.  You may well have seen those old Athletic Model Guild films on video, or the film Beefcake, that has recently featured in a number of UK gay film festivals.

Beefcake has been acquired by the British Film Institute, and the BFI have re-issued the movie which explores new themes of male nudity that had never been explored in film before. Such an increase in nudity within the film is something dramatically different than the typical theme of a movie in the 1960s. Beefcake demonstrates, in a very graphic manner, all the reasons why in the race to bare all, male nudity has, over many decades, always finished a very distant second to that of the female form. Unusually the movie did put many male bodies and genitals on display, in an effort to live up to its rather racey title.