Pinup boys of the 1950’s — beautifully lit in black and white and as silkily available as their female counterparts. It amazes us today that the photographer who took these pictures had to go to jail several times for trying to sell them.

What was then the most inflamed, forbidden pornography — one self-righteous blowhard even called the photographer a Communist for trying to corrupt “our clean American boys” — now seems sedate. Homoerotic to be sure, but very tasteful by 21st Century standards.

None of these classic gay photos would exist had it not been for Bob Mizer, photographer and founder of AMG, the Athletic Model Guild. The prolific Mizer left behind, as well, rare film clips and short movies of his scantily dressed discoveries. (Now available in the five-DVD bundle Fantasy Factory from AMG.) At the time no one else was shooting this material, let alone selling it through the mail.

When he began in 1945 as a photographer of professional bodybuilders, Bob Mizer felt constrained by the physique magazines of the period. They wanted pragmatic photos of bodybuilders, usually on a beach, striking various contest poses.

The wink-wink homoerotic element was to be kept subliminal. Bob had problems with this, judging from surviving photos where he seems to have insisted that his deltoid-flexing hunks wear super-tight trunks. How, he may have wondered, could there be any serious study of the Body Beautiful without its natural sexual context — not hidden, but expressed.

Thus was born the era of the skimpy posing strap and a whole movie studio in Mizer’s backyard. Here around the pool, his pinup models (right) — no longer bulked-up bodybuilders but lithe youths — were coaxed to wrestle and horse around with each other while the cameras rolled.

Heavily oiled — an AMG trademark — the skin occasionally flares with white, overexposed highlights. As the films progress — Mizer made over 3000 of them — his technique becomes more assured, though time has not been kind to the film stock, which often appears, on these digital DVDs, grainy, fuzzing the focus.

Even time, though, can not dim the beauty of the cast, frozen forever in their strapping, young prime. Happily, Mizer lived a few blocks off Hollywood Boulevard, that ever replenishing pool of what was coyly called “fresh talent”: drifters and Heartland hayseeds who blew into town with sketchy notions of becoming movie stars. Dropping trou, no problem. As long as it got them into the movies.

In the bargain, Mizer often let the newcomers bunk out at his house. He had a reputation on the Boulevard for being a soft touch and a kind man.

Watching the Fantasy Factory DVDs, I was reminded of the era in which they were made. Mizer was a fan of those big, Sixties toga epics — Ben Hur, Ten Commandments, Cleopatra. And in a charming, small-scale, silent-movie way he does his best to reproduce them — but with AMG’s all-boy troupe of posing-strap studlings.

So there are the slave auctions of near-nude men (left), the Arabian Nights adventures of near-nude men, the Aztec sacrifices of feather-headressed and gold-ingot-earring wearing near-nude men.

No length of gauze was spared in the making of these backyard spectaculars. Scenery is a dizzy mix of Plaster of Paris pillars and lots and lots of drapery. Titles have a goofy magic all their own, including The Psychiatrist and the Hood, The Cowboy Poker Party (strip poker, of course), and — with a dazzlingly blond lead — The Not-So-Nasty Nazi.

But no matter what the plot, everybody finds a reason to undress, oil up and do endless beach calisthenics: handstands, muscle flexes, free-style wrestling. As the newly added soundtrack moves from catchy do-wops to rolling, ride-the-wave guitar riffs, the Fifties posing straps are shed for Sixties’ Free Love frontals.

I particularly enjoyed the enthusiastic, gee-whiz narration by Steve Malis, a hump who appears between the clips in what looks like AMG-approved model wear — a muscleshirt and impossibly tight short-shorts, a muscleshirt and basket-molding chinos — the only AMG ensemble our jovial host seems to have missed is the Neapolitan-striped posing pouch worn with a cowboy hat.

Begun in 1991, the Fantasy Factory DVDs were intended as a feature-length documentary on Mizer’s work. This was never to be. Mizer died the following year. “It means a lot to me that Bob was able to see the first Fantasy Factory before he passed away,” say Marvin Jones of Campfire Video, which originally produced the series. “He had a glow in his eyes when he saw some of the films that he hadn’t even thought about in decades.”

It wasn’t until Dennis Bell of the Posing Strap website acquired the AMG estate that the Fantasy Factory DVDs were made widely available. Bell has added samples of Mizer’s 1980 video work, as well as DVD extras and alternate voice-overs. He also revived the AMG studio, producing new nostalgia-styled features and establishing himself as the true heir to Mizer’s legacy.

Most promising, the last image on Volume 5 carries this long overdue announcement: all existing negatives of AMG movies will be preserved “for future generations by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.”

A must for any serious Gay and Lesbian history archive, Fantasy Factory has much to say, in its charming, upbeat way, about Sex in America during the 20th Century: the codes, the jail sentences, the sexual revolution and the emergence, finally, of completely avowed same-sex desire.

Order the Fantasy Factory DVD set
Visit the Athletic Model Guild Site
Visit the Posing Strap website

See also this Nightcharm Feature
AMG: When Rough Trade was King