The Daily Agenda for Friday, March 27

Jim Burroway

March 27th, 2015

TODAY’S AGENDA:
Pride Celebrations This Weekend: Lafayette, LA; Lake Worth, FL.

Other Events This Weekend: European Gay Ski Week, Avoriaz, France; Los Angeles Leather Pride, Los Angeles, CA; AIDS WAlk, Orlando, FL; European Snow Pride, Tignes, France.

TODAY’S AGENDA is brought to you by:

From The Advocate, April 3, 1980, page 39.

The original location, in a light industrial area of Miami underneath the flight path for Miami International, is gone, replaced with a parking lot for an auto paint shop. The Ft. Lauderdale location is now a strip mall.

ONE Magazine, March 1955.

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY:
60 YEARS AGO: Miami Bar Posts House Rules: 1955. Gallows humor has long been a valuable coping mechanism whenever things haven’t been going well. And things hadn’t been going well for Miami’s gay community, which had experienced wave after wave of police raids, arbitrary arrests, and general persecution over the previous year (see Aug 3Aug 11Aug 12Aug 13 (twice that day), Aug 14Aug 15Aug 16Aug 26Aug 31Sep 1Sep 2Sep 7Sep 15Sep 19Oct 6Oct 20Nov 12 and Dec 16). According to ONE Magazine, an un-named Miami-area bar tried to make light of the situation by posting the following set of rules for its patrons to follow:

Rules and Regulations Covering the Behavior of Our Customers

First of all-remember that the customer is never right.

Before drinking each beer customer is to repeat six times “Customer is never right.”

When customer wishes to go to the restroom–please raise hand and barmaid will direct you to proper door.

Mother and daughter customers are not allowed to hold hands, kiss or pat each other on back. On week-ends they are not allowed to even talk to each other.

No after-shave lotion or talcum powder allowed on men customers.

Women must wear make-up-false eyelashes and beauty marks will be provided at the bar for those women customers who have just come from the beach and don’t have their make-up kits with them.

Men may wear only stiff shirts and tails.

Any male customer caught buying a beer for another male customer will have to buy a beer for the barmaid too so that the management will know that the man customer is of high moral character and not one of those characters.

Female customers may not talk at all–they are required to walk around the bar at least once every five minutes, dropping handkerchiefs and swooning at the far turn.

Male customers ‘may NOT wave at friends or relatives passing by in the street because we’ll have none of those gestures in this place, my dear.

Lady customers may smoke only if male customer lights cigarette for them.

Lady customers may smoke only cigarettes with ivory tips, jewelled pipes or Between the Acts cigars.

Male customers must have hair on the chest–if you have none–please bring along another chest with the required hair on it. (We will gladly refrigerate it for you while you’re here).

Male customers are required to spit periodically. Since we have no spittoons please use the guy next to you.

Please do not be offended if we do not serve you. Here are but a few of the people we could not serve if they were able to patronize us : Socrates, Wilde, Proust, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Queen Christina, Amy Lowell, Lord Tennyson, etc., etc. and far on into the night.

The bar also posted a detailed “Questionnaire to be filled in by prospective customer before selling 15¢ beer.” It asked for the customer’s name, address, phone number, boss’s phone number, parents’ names and three references. Also, and presumably to make the police’s job of notifying everyone possible if you were arrested, it asked for “names and addresses of five business or personal friends of your parents and their wives or husbands.”

[Source: J.K. “Letter from Miami.” ONE 3, no. 3 (March 1955): 44.]

TODAY’S BIRTHDAY:
Bob Mizer: 1922-1992. Before there was the internet and its most lucrative offering, online porn, and before the proliferation of dead-tree porn in the late 1960s through the 1980s, there was the “physique” magazines that sprang up after World War II. Bob Mizer was the mild-mannered publisher and photographer for Physique Pictorial, one of many such magazines that published “beefcake” photographs under the guise of bodybuilding and health. His photography studio, the Athletic Model Guild (AMG), specialized in men (gay and straight) doing bodybuilding poses or wrestling in pairs. But that thin guise — almost as thin as the posing pouch that his models wore — wasn’t enough to keep him from being convicted in 1947 of unlawful distribution of obscene materials and serving a nine month sentence at a work camp in Saugus, California.

Physique Pictorial, Summer 1958.

That setback barely put a dent into Mizer’s career. In addition the Physique Pictorial, Mizer added Young Adonis in 1963 and Grecian Guild Studio Quarterly in 1966. When obscenity laws were relaxed in 1968 allowing full male frontal nudity, Mizer quickly adapted with the times. Through it all, AMG was very much a family affair, with Mizer’s mother (her skills as a seamstress was put to use in creating a line of skimpy briefs and posing pouches) and brother (an accountant) playing important roles in the business. Mizer would photograph thousands of men and take nearly a million different images. He also produced over 3000 film titles from the 1950s to the 1980’s, which mostly consisted of film (and later, videotape) of his photo sessions.

He died in 1992, and AMG went dormant for a while. But under new ownership, Mizer’s archives are being catalogued and digitally remastered. Mizer never thought of himself as an artists, but his work has garnered a significant re-appraisal in the past two decades, which influenced artists like Robert Mappelthorpe and David Hockney. The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2004 that “Mizer’s pictures are historically important because they capture a time, place and attitude so vividly that it still seems to be with us. His photographs are inspiring because they were not made to fill a market niche that already existed. Instead, they created the niche and then filled it with aplomb.” In 2009, Taschen Books released the monograph Bob’s World: The Life and Boys of A.M.G.’s Bob Mizer.

If you know of something that belongs on the agenda, please send it here. Don’t forget to include the basics: who, what, when, where, and URL (if available).

This your open thread for the day. What’s happening in your world?

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