Bob Mizer at Invisible-Exports Is The Daily Pic By Blake Gopnik

This is a collaged contact-sheet, of sorts, made in about 1959 by the American photographer Bob Mizer, who is a major figure from gay erotica's Silver Age, as I guess you could call it. A full spread (ahem) of his work is now in a show at Invisible-Exports gallery in New York. It's hard not to smile at the innocence his images now seem to have. There's also some poignancy in noting how hard it once was to express gay desire. (Mizer was the subject of frequent police harassment.) Also interesting: how different our reaction might be to equivalent imagery of naked women from the same era's straight world, whose nudie pictures might seem more fraught.

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