Chuck Renslow
Chuck Renslow 1929-2017We learned yesterday of the death of Chuck Renslow. A friend and contemporary of Bob Mizer, Chuck was a larger than life part of gay history. He owned gay businesses in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s when......
Chuck Renslow 1929-2017We learned yesterday of the death of Chuck Renslow. A friend and contemporary of Bob Mizer, Chuck was a larger than life part of gay history. He owned gay businesses in Chicago in the 1950s and 60s when......
When male physique photographer and COLT Studio founder Jim French died in his sleep on Thursday evening, he left behind a mammoth body of work that shaped the adult film industry for decades to come. Described by LGBT historians as......
Gay erotic film began, mostly, with Bob Mizer at AMG in Los Angeles in the mid ’50’s. In the late 1960’s, when nudes and hardcore sex became more or less legal, film really took off. Chuck Holmes and Ken Albert started......
Bruce of Los Angeles (Bruce Bellas) for many years attended the Calgary Stampede rodeo in Canada to photograph the cowboys. In 1974 while there with his favorite model, Scotty Cunningham, he unexpectedly died of heart failure. He left his......
The work of one of Britain’s most accomplished male physique photographers preceded Bob Mizer by nearly a decade, forever changing the art of capturing man’s beauty on film....
The Foundation is actively exploring the possibility of launching Beefcake TV, a streaming video channel featuring a selection of Bob Mizer's 3,000 short films. This channel would be available through Apple TV, Roku, IOS and Android. As......
Author’s note: This is the second in a three-part series on the history of physique culture in Great Britain. Look for part III on our blog on Tuesday, December 27....
While serving in World War II, Don Whitman developed a friendship with a fellow sailor who related his experiences of modeling and posing for photographers. While the model’s name is lost to history, it’s believed this chance meeting......
Kenneth Reed Phippen was born in 1937 in Logan, Utah. He was the only son in a family of four children. The family moved to Kaysville, on the shores of the Great Salt Lake before he entered high school. In high school......
Before the models of Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild redefined masculinity to a puritanical American audience, there was the original ‘strong man,’ Eugene Sandow. Known as the father of modern bodybuilding, Sandow was born in......
As soup lines grew, the content of wallets shrank and the country reeled from the Great Depression, one boy made it his mission to make Americans find a reason to feel the wonder of magic once again. Born Arthur Brandon in 1916 in......
They were truly everyman – mostly unknown, private figures whose lives were turned upside down with the opening of a package. Maybe it was a male physique magazine. Or a series of photographs or slides. Whatever the offending materials,......
Before the Grecian Guild beckoned closeted gay men to meet one another and engage in cathartic discussions about their deepest desires, there was the Mattachine Society. The organization, conceived as the Mattachine Foundation in 1950 and......
H. Lynn Womack was at a turning point in his young life. Very little about Womack was easy to ignore. He was rotund and known for his voracious appetite and booming laugh. Womack was an albino, his hair a glistening white from a young......
At the same time photographer and filmmaker Bob Mizer’s empire expanded and embraced nudity in front of the lens at his L.A. compound, on the other side of the country, pop artist Andy Warhol’s fame also grew. Next year will mark the......
Although most followers of media law are familiar with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1968 ruling in Ginsburg v. New York that nudity in art could not be ruled obscene, one court case in the late 1960s also had the attention......
