​FAKIR MUSAFAR

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Fakir Musafar (Roland Loomis) was born in 1930 in Aberdeen, South Dakota, on what was then part of the Sisseton-Sioux reservation. An outcast raised during the Great Depression, westward expansion, and the forced integration of Indigenous children into white schools, Musafar's proximity to the nearby Sioux exposed him to beliefs that strongly contrasted his devout Lutheran family's practices. These polar belief structures in turn fueled his lifelong interests in pantheism and spiritual ecstasy. ​​

Musafar, 1935

Between 1942 and 1943 two seminal events occurred in Musafar's life. He was gifted a camera by his uncle and began learning how to shoot and develop photographs, and he performed his first self-inflicted body piercing. Building a darkroom in his parent's fruit cellar, Musafar experimented with piercing, restriction, and tattoo, and the practice of documenting his experimentation in 35mm photographs. In 1947 while performing self-piercing and self-bondage, he had the first of three transformative out of body experiences, solidifying his belief that the erotic and the spiritual were deeply entwined. He began studying Sadhu practices, yoga, and consuming any anthropological materials available. In the 1940s those materials were largely comic books, National Geographic magazines, Encyclopedias, and stories. ​​

Musafar's self portraits, 1944

Understanding gender as another facet of bodily manipulation, what Musafar called "body play," he began documenting his "gender between the cracks" at the age of 17. Later in life he would cultivate his transformative gender play through BDSM play and faerie culture, understanding himself as gender fluid, and believing that gender, like sexuality, is porous, malleable, and worthy of life-long exploration.

Daggers, self portrait, 1979

​After military service and college, Musafar moved to California in the 1960s, where he became involved with advertising, but also became involved with a rich underground community of kinksters and early explorers of gender nonconformity and body modification. His collaborations with Jim Ward and Doug Malloy laid the groundwork for what would become an entire movement, one that remained subcultural throughout the 80s and 90s, and that is now mainstream. Doug brought the resources and access points, Jim brought the business model and practicalities, and Fakir brought a philosophy. What began at underground parties and gay BDSM clubs grew into a series of publications ("Piercing Fans International Quarterly" (PFIQ) and "Body Play") and eventually a business called Gauntlet Enterprises: the first piercing studio opened in Los Angeles, California in 1978.

This same year Musafar performed on stage publicly for the first time as "Fakir Musafar," the first of his two-decades-long performance art career. He chose his name by collaging Hindu and Sufi mysticism - “Fakir”: one who performs feats of endurance, and “Musafar”: a traveler or seeker. The idea for this name is credited firstly as coming from a Ripley's "Believe it or Not!" comic book: just one example of the influence of settler colonialism on this movement. Early staples of Musafar's performance career included circus and absurdist influences: laying on a bed of nails or blades, carrying a typewriter from large hooks in his chest, while later works grew to incorporate ceremonial practices, ritual, costume, and collaborators. Musafar shared stage bills with Annie Sprinkle, Ron Athey, Franco B, Genesis P-Orridge, and other seminal body art practitioners of the time.

Slice of Life, self portrait, 1965

In the 1980s Fakir met his life partner Cléo Dubois and became involved with a leather-focused offshoot of the Radical Faerie community. The two put their efforts toward creating ritual and play for transformative practices to unfold within that community. Experiencing epic upheaval during the AIDS crisis, as many of the founding faeries were lost to the disease, the community faced pains and shifts. In the 1990s Musafar began teaching - a practice that would consume his later years. As the gospel of body modification spread (with the help of key figures like Jim Ward and Raelyn Galina), he also began writing, contributing to numerous books, articles and essays on body modification, writing introductions to numerous academic texts, and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) section on body modification.

1998 saw the release of Musafar's monograph, Spirit + Flesh, featuring his most iconic photographs from 1947 through 1992. Musafar continued to photograph and teach through 2015. He was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2017 and passed the following year. The Fakir Musafar Piercing Intensives are still offered by Musafar's disciples in San Francisco, California. His vast contributions to the fields of photography and performance have largely gone under-acknowledged, as have the questions of cultural responsibility that surround body modification practices today.

Musafar at Ren Fair, 1989