Pioneering piercer Fakir Musafar dies
Fakir Musafar, a gasp-inducing practitioner and leading advocate of “body play” — the term he used to describe piercing, branding, tattooing, footbinding, corseting, body suspension and other practices that stretch, contort or otherwise alter the human form — died Aug. 1 at his home in Menlo Park, Calif. He was 87. The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Cléo Dubois. A self-described “shaman, artist, master piercer and body modifier,” Musafar was “an astronaut of inner spaces,” the photographer Charles Gatewood once said, part of a “sub-sub-subculture” that crept into public view in the 1970s. Initially centered on the gay sadomasochism and fetish communities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, it spawned what Musafar described as an international if occasionally over-the-top movement, in which entertainment sometimes replaced what he saw as the spiritual nourishment attainable through body play.
“By using your body, modifying your body, you can go into states of consciousness and discover the true nature of life and yourself,” he told Shannon Larratt, founder of the body modification website BMEzine.
Musafar called himself a “modern primitive” — a phrase that became the title of an influential 1989 book, dubbed the “body-mod bible” by the New York Times — and traced his practices to ancient traditions, drawing inspiration from sources including Islamic mysticism, Hinduism, Native American ceremonies and the tattooing cultures of Borneo and the Marquesas Islands.
He began with clothespins, using them to stretch his skin in childhood, and at 14 made his first piercing, inspired by a photo in National Geographic of a South Seas islander who had bored a hole in his nostril.
Inserting a nail into one side of a clothespin, creating a clamp, he pierced his genitals, the one place he believed his body modifications would go unseen. “I put in a little copper ring,” he told Larratt in 1997, by then in his late 60s, “and I still have that piercing today.”
He gave himself his first tattoo as a teenager, using his mother’s sewing needles, India ink and Listerine as an antiseptic. About that same time, inspired by a photo of “a wasp-waisted boy” from tribal New Guinea, he began cinching a belt around his waist at night, drawing it tighter until he experienced “shifts in consciousness.” He later used corsets of his own design to narrow his midriff by about half, giving himself a 19-inch waist.
While Musafar’s practices grew increasingly exotic as he got older — at one point he hung two dozen 1-pound weights from piercings on his chest — he kept them secret from all but his closest friends, using his birth name of Roland Edmund Loomis while working as an ad man in Silicon Valley.