Beefcake Revelation: Porno-Cosmology in Bob Mizer's Gift for Demetrius
I place the DVD onto the plastic circle that keeps it in place and notice a sentence typed out on the back of the case: “It is our belief that the most disputed works of art are the most important to the progress of society.”[1] The DVD is one volume in a collection of DVDs from the Bob Mizer Film Archive of the Bob Mizer Foundation. The “disputed works” distributed by the Foundation comprise movies and photographs of barely-clad to fully nude men taken by the prolific gay male photographer Bob Mizer from the 1940s through 1970s. Included in the collection are over 3,000 film masters and 1,000,000 film stills[2] of young men flexing, posing, dancing, wrestling, playing games, swimming, acting out dramatic scenes, and—from the 1970s on—engaging in soft-core pornographic activity.
The title of this specific volume is Bob Mizer: Films of Mythos 1956-1971. These videos are linked by the Bob Mizer Foundation through their shared mythological mises-en-scéne. Short and without audio, each places young men in various exotic locales: medieval Arabia, ancient Greece or Rome, and even in the land of Oz! Some of the shorts include magical elements like wizards, devils, satyrs, and dangerous beasts. All include the wearing (and removal) of theatrical, period costumes.
The subtitle Films of Mythos may be nothing more than an attribution of a superficial “mythic” aesthetic to otherwise unrelated erotic films. However, the mythic frame can also serve to point out a sacred narrative and ritual function of gay male erotic film, broadly. By focusing on one short from the volume, Gift for Demetrius from a queer theological approach, I hope to 1) examine the film as a depiction of a utopian myth with transformational implications; 2) show how watching the film functions as a sacred ritual of disrupting normative masculine gender and sexuality; and 3) how the interplay between mythic content and ritualized engagement constitute a porno-cosmology, that is, an act of world building through queer scopophilia and erotic imagination.
The Myth
Gift for Demetrius (1958) tells a fairly simple story about a father, a son, and a slave boy living in the ancient world. The father loves his son and gives his son a beautiful ring, but the father's disregard for the slave’s humanity proves to be his downfall. The son and the slave, meanwhile, form a bond across social lines and end up choosing their companionship over the society they've grown to now. They happily leave the past behind, growing forward into a vibrant, abstract, illumination.
Since, the film lacks audio, I will spend some time describing the images as they appear. Each of the characters in Gift for Demetrius is played by a muscular, apparently white actor. The setting is a generic Mediterranean antiquity, indicated through white pillars, stone benches, a garden, and marble statues of men. It opens with a scene of the slave boy, smiling and flexing as he sweeps in front of a white stone structure. He wears a posing strap, a tight loin cloth that appears completely nude from the back. Tired from sweeping, the slave lies down and begins to nod off. The father enters, his age and socioeconomic status indicated by his beard and clothes: a short tunic and intricate sandals. He grabs the slave’s broom and hits him with it. The slave kneels and kisses the father’s feet, while the camera lingers on the slave’s backside. The father goes to a stone couch, sits, and opens up a metal box: inside is a large, ornamental ring. He gestures to the slave to exit.
The scene changes to a pool. The son, also in posing strap, sits by the water. The slave enters, covers the son's eyes with his hands in a guess who game. They both jump into the water, wrestle, and engage in horseplay, before the slave nonverbally indicates that the father has something to give to the son.
The slave exits and returns with a helmet and a short metal skirt which he puts around the son’s waist, returning the youth to his aristocratic status through these signifiers and providing a visual contrast between the two. The slave and son return to the father. The father opens the box and gives his son the ring. The slave exits and returns with food and wine which he accidentally spills on the father. The father angrily starts hitting the slave and the slave runs off into a garden. The son follows the slave into the garden, where he is lying on a bench, weeping. The son tries to make the slave smile and eventually gives him the new ring. The father enters at this moment and assumes the slave stole the ring. He ties the slave to a pillar, ignoring his son’s protest. As the father is about to whip the slave, the son stands in front of his friend’s body, and the father drops the whip, not wanting to hurt his son. The father decides to banish his son and the slave. The older man is left alone, sitting on a stone bench. He discards the ring into a box, realizing and regretting that he has treasured an object over human life. The scene cuts to the slave and the son, in nearly identical tunics, no longer distinguished by class signifiers, joyfully exiting the scene against a glowing background.
The film is an example of the kind of social commentary rife throughout Bob Mizer’s career. Mizer rose to fame and infamy through his muscle man magazine Physique Pictorial, which began in the late 1940s. The political nature of the seemingly apolitical, highly romanticized and fantastical content can be quite striking. Images of happy young men, hanging out together and barely dressed are often accompanied by pointed didactics: “The captions sometimes run to several paragraphs, which are often about censorship or police corruption or the role of the state in civil society.”[3] Indeed, Mizer, who was, early in his career, arrested and imprisoned for several months for distribution of lewd material, has deeply self-preservational reasons to include captions about American free speech. His consistent critiques of classicism and racism, however, indicate a certain promise he sees as inherent to an open homophilia distinct from the inversion model of pathologized gay man popularized in the sociology and psychology of the early-to-mid 20th century: “for many of the physique editors (especially Mizer) the project is to equate male homosexuality with sociability itself.”[4]
Mizer often depicts models relating to other models, framing the appreciation of male physiques as a social interaction. What is true in the photography magazines is also true in Gift for Demetrius, although the film includes no written language beside the title and credits. When the son and the slave are at the pool, it is impossible to distinguish the classes to which each man belongs. They are both (practically) naked, happy, playful, and muscular. The division of their classes only is apparent when the slave is forced to do his father's bidding. He eventually dresses the son so that the father can gift the ring to his son. The father’s scenes disrupt the visual equality that the boys previously shared: one wears metal and one does not. The father belongs to an old order that enslaves others and cares more for material wealth social symbols than for authentic human connection. The ring could have symbolized marriage, if the young men kept it, if one gave it to the other to be worn, but such a synthesis of their love with the familial institution of marriage would soften what is in fact a radical rejection of the father’s values. They leave behind the ring, that symbol of state-sanctioned love signified by precious metal, and escape into an unspecified future. In matching clothes, no longer divided by class or familial distinctions, they walk off into a horizon of light.
Queer literary historian, Christopher Nealon argues that images like those used in Gift for Demetrius “contextualize that body utopically, as part of a vision of a nonpunishing social fabric.”[5] It is in the nonverbal, visually rich interplay between the young men’s bodies that pleas for a society (and a homosexuality) other than the one most familiar to Mizer’s generation. Mizer posits a world where bodies can coexist with and within each other, where the key to a new social order exists in the destigmatization of queer love. Gift for Demetrius reconfigures the objects (a term which I will complicate in the next section) of gay male desire as a utopian myth. Utopian myth, in turn, holds a crucial place in liberation theologies.
The late, famed theologian Gustavo Gutierrez incorporates Marxist, utopian ideas in his theology of liberation. He writes, “Utopia, contrary to what current usage suggests, is characterized by its relationship to present historical reality.”[6] Utopian myths are comments on contextualized, historic moments. The utopia serves as “denunciation and annunciation”[7] of society. It elucidates the problems of the society in which it is told while providing an image, a potentiality, and an announcement of what could be. For Gutierrez, utopia, in critiquing the vast socioeconomic injustices of the world while presenting solidarity and joy with the poor, announces the Kingdom of God, although it is not identical with it.
When I watch Gift for Demetrius, I see a world of the father denounced by the utopian signifiers of young male bodies. The young men, and the way they interact, reject a world where such love is scorned, where nuclear family, state and property are part of and old man’s ideology that inevitably leads to dehumanization. Gift for Demetrius ends with the young homosocial/homosexual men rejecting the limitations of the "now" by moving toward a mythic "then." There is no clear depiction of the promised land toward which they walk, but their movement toward new possibility inspires the viewer to come with them. The men's joyful hope is the beefcake annunciation of God’s Kingdom.
The Ritual
A utopian myth is dramatized in Gift for Demetrius and advocates for liberational rejection of the status quo, but how does this effort exist in practice, that is, in watching the erotic film? In Strategies of Deviance, Earl Jackson incoporates psychoanalysis to theorize gay male ways of seeing. He discusses gay pornography as an apparatus, a “panoply of local, historically responsive subcultural practices that often produce tangible expressions of counterdiscursively realized social identities.”[8] An apparatus is not a strategy to undo the dominant power but, working with Foucault, a “strategic formation of heterogeneous elements that arises ‘at a given historical moment’ in response ‘to an urgent need.’”[9] Amidst the criminalization and illegitimization of homosexual life, gay pornography is an apparatus of homosexual expression. It is not inherently radical or challenging of hegemony but ambiguously serves a subordinated population and exercises the imagination of the disenfranchised. A queer kid, like myself growing up, might not have met a lot of gay male adults, may have never learned about same-sex sexual education in school, or had language for their own burgeoning erotic conscious, after all: “Gay pornographic texts were among the first nonapologetic expressions of homosexual desire.”[10] Gay pornography, though subject to the highly problematic market of porn in general, was, early in my life, one of the few places to encounter someone at least in part like me, who feels like me, who loves like me.
In an essay on the ethics of film viewership, Margaret Miles and S. Brent Plate argue that “cinema provides us with a sort of training ground, a place to be confronted with visual otherness and to practice our response.”[11] Fetishistic and objectifying as much of it is, pornography, like the more socially acceptable (although often as dehumanizing) cinema, can likewise act as a training ground for our responses to difference. Gift for Demetrius, not quite porn or cinema, asks the viewer to imagine a homosociality beyond what many of us, especially queer males, experience as “correct” behavior between masculine persons. It can train the viewer to express warmness, playfulness, and sensitivity, to break through normative gender codes, even though on some level, the film also portrays a hypermasculine, bodily normativity. I do not look like the men in the film, but I do struggle being vulnerable with other males. While I might critique the fit, chiseled, white bodies, I am thankful to see a behavioral model between men that is not competitive, cruel, or at the expense of women. While we can learn better ways to engage difference by watching films like Gift for Demetrius, we, who diverge from the normative, can also learn new ways to become ourselves. We can even learn to rupture “the self.”
The ritual of viewing gay pornography, for a gay man, can disrupt the illusion of a self through a kind of psychosexual alchemy:
the significance of the gay pornographic apparatus lies in the ways in which it allows gay men to reaffirm or actualize in specular situations the determining differences between the ‘narcissistic’ subject and the ‘anaclitic’ subject in their respective mythic points of origin: the response to the Oedipal crisis.[12]
In the Oedipal scheme, the male child must desire becoming (like) his father and desire to act on/against a woman, (like) his mother. To want to be like his mother would be to desire castration, and to want to be with someone like his father would be to behave like the castrated. The male homosexual, in Freud’s scheme, is narcissistic as opposed to anaclitic: his “self” is formed (unhealthily) as a subject acting toward his self also as object, whereas the healthy, heterosexual male forms his self in opposition to the (female) other. Jackson sees a subversive possibility in Freud’s scheme, in reclaiming the narcissistic as a kind of movement between Freud’s narcissistic and anaclitic selfs. The gay man (and I would also posit lots of other queer folks) “often wishes to become like the desired object, in order to be as attractive to the object as the object is to him, or as attractive to himself or others as the object is attractive to him.”[13] If this is a confusing sentence, good! The gay male confuses the dichotomies of subject/object and therefore male/female. I can see the actor playing the slave boy’s body as desirable and I can also want to be seen like him, that is, myself be seen by potential lovers in the same way his character is looked upon by the actor playing the son—and looked upon by me, the viewer of the film.
Both in wanting and relating to the men in Mizer’s film, I access a “network of ‘inappropriate’ or transgressive identifications, structured by the anti-Oedipal mutuality of identification and desire.”[14] I reject the firmly delineated, masculine self even as the son and slave reject the classism and heteronormativity of the father. For Jackson,
the gay viewer not only identifies with figures on the screen who are betraying the sex/gender system of dominant heterosexuality, but he also identifies with the acts of betrayal themselves, the negating affirmations those on screen figures commit, or the acts of negating affirmation that constitute the screen image as a representation of an identifiable gay subject.[15]
In identifying with both the son and the slave, I am aligning myself with their process of negating a father’s command on how to be. I identify with the rejection of the ring, symbolizing the institution of marriage, historically tied to the acquisition and perpetuation of material goods. The son and the slave, at the moments of humor, harmony, love, and friendship, dress the same and look nearly identical: two subjects. Each is in love with a self who is like him but who is also uniquely other, not because of class differentials, but because of the universally inherited gift of distinct subjecthood. The utopian kingdom, wherever it may be, is open to those who have destroyed the line between the self and other, confused the borders between I and thou. Viewing Gift for Demetrius includes moments of self annihilation (a gendered, raced, classed self) and is a mystical praxis analogous to the great dissolutions of the self in medieval Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or Sufi mysticism.
Porno-Cosmology
The mythic representation within the film and the ritual of viewing the film constitute, what I would like to call, a porno-cosmology. According to Plate, “religion and cinema both build their worlds through the framing and selecting activities of, on the one hand, mythologizing, ritualizing, and sacralizing, and on the other hand, editing, cinematography, and mise-en-scène.”[16] The interaction between spectator and video yields a material response: “the senses are stimulated to produce laughter, disgust, and even potentially an ethical response to the faces of people we do not often encounter in a filmic life.”[17] Movies shape the way we interact with one another, how we perform our masculinities and femininities, our races and our classes. Meanwhile, “filmic images have leapt off the screen and entered physical, three-dimensional spaces, leaving their after-images in cement, religious consciousness, and ritual practices.”[18] The strict Hays Code of the 20th century demonstrate perfectly that the conservative, right wing, cultural machine recognized (and feared) the world-making possibility of film. Mizer’s imprisonment likewise shows the power of his images, that such content threatens the empire enough that it must distinguish the revolutionary flame before it catches.
World making, in theological terms, is cosmology. Therefore, Gift for Demetrius, in presenting a possible other world, is a cosmological artifact. But what about the ritual of watching the movie? Plate writes that “rituals are condensations of cosmic powers in their ideal form, [and] they are also a series of framed and focused sensations that make the body move in particular ways.”[19] Rituals represent a cosmology, but they also continue its poiesis in the material world, affecting our bodies, how they move, and how they grow. When it comes to film, no other genre elicits a material consequence quite as much as pornography and erotica. Horror might come close, stimulating heavy breathing, sweating, nervous laughter, screams and restless dreams, but the pornographic artifact prompts those same things but with the intention of doing so in an even more total way through the potentiality of the viewer’s orgasm, muscle spasms, and ejaculations, stimulating a concrete transference of matter from the interior to the exterior, from in the self to out in the exterior world. Dirty films are intended to be participatory. They are often foreplay and background to sexual encounters. They are the foreplay to worlds, erotically, emerging.
For a subset of queer people, some of the first texts that do not demonize us are pornographic or erotic. Our emergence with non-pathologized identities, is, to an extent, indebted to porno-cosmological pursuits which offered something other than a criminal or pathological framework. For Mizer, the homosexual and the homosocial are not easily distinguished: liberation of the former leads to transmutation of the latter. In porno-cosmology is a recognition that my desire for a new, more just, more free world is not separate from my desire for flesh that embodies a revolutionary vision. Rather, the two desires are interpenetrative, and golly—isn’t that swell?
Notes
[1]Bob Mizer: Films of Mythos 1956-1971, ed. & dis. by the Bob Mizer Foundation Film Archive, (El Cerrito, CA: Bob Mizer Foundation, 2013), DVD, back cover.
[2]Bob Mizer: Films of Mythos 1956-1971, Bob Mizer Foundation Film Archive, DVD
[3]Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001), 102.
[4]Nealon, Foundlings, 105.
[5]Nealon, Foundlings, 105.
[6] Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, trans. Sister Caridad Inga & John Eagleson (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1973, 1988), 135.
[7]Gutiérrez, A Theology, 136.
[8]Earl Jackson, Jr. “Graphic Specularity,” in Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 130.
[9]Jackson, “Graphic,” 129.
[10]Jackson, “Graphic,” 130.
[11]Margaret R. Miles and S. Brent Plate, “Hospitable Vision: Some Notes On the Ethics of Seeing Film,” in Crosscurrents 54, (2004), 30.
[12]Jackson, “Graphic,” 132.
[13]Jackson, “Graphic,” 132.
[14]Jackson, “Graphic,” 139.
[15]Jackson, “Graphic,” 139.
[16]S. Brent Plate, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 154
[17]Plate, Religion and Film, 154.
[18]Plate, Religion and Film, 153.
[19]Plate, Religion and Film, 103.
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