Bob Mizer, “Delicate Convict,” nd.

Bob Mizer is best known for the beefcake photographs he reproduced in his influential proto-pornographic magazine Physique Pictorial. Less well-known are the nearly 3,000 films he produced during his lifetime, which echoed the visual and narrative language of his still images. Delicate Convict shows a slaphappy group of seminude young men wrestling each other under the disciplinary watch of a security guard. It might be understood as Mizer’s answer to Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour.