Unauthorized Connections

Bob Mizer ran his physique photography company, the Athletic Model Guild, for nearly half a century and his work has been celebrated from many perspectives, including historical scholarship, art books, and the development of a dedicated archive. The numerous legal battles that Mizer endured throughout his career have sometimes been interpreted through the lens of individuality, both as a testament to Mizer’s prominence in the development of queer visual culture and as evidence of the lengths anti-gay police would go to stymie his homoerotically-infused artistic endeavors. Yet, importantly, the criminal cases against Mizer also embroiled his associates in the field, blasting the punishing shrapnel of state repression among not only his photographer-contemporaries but also anyone who might have had contact with them. This article demonstrates how scholarship on anti-queer censorship might expand beyond a celebratory focus on individual auteurs and entrepreneurs to account for the complex networks of connectivity that were the ultimate targets of the state. The article develops a historiographic method to contextualize censorship by considering the multiplicity of affected parties as a scattered collective of business associates that bubbled up to become ambivalent pockets of postwar capitalism. In turn, the state’s aim to annihilate the possibility of gay social life in Los Angeles hinged on targeting queer assemblages connected in a networked and dispersed fashion. Expanding the concept of individualized censorship as an occlusion of a unidirectional public expression, this article asserts that a quintessential form of anti-queer censorship has been the severing of social connectivity through the targeting of multiple members of distributed collectives like Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild

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