Modern Body Piercing: Born From Kink and Queerness

A couple months back, I wrote a column talking about the history of men and ear piercings and how the prevalence today of body piercing has links to queerness. I mourned my slim word count in comparison to the vast amount of information on the subject, specifically discussions about Jim Ward who opened Gauntlet, the world’s first body piercing studio, in the mid-70s. 

Ward was responsible for popularizing a variety of body piercings, developing many modern-day techniques and jewelry designs, and ultimately helped to lay the foundation for body piercing as a worldwide industry. 

Ward had an interest in body piercing prior to opening his studio, largely born from his involvement in the New York Motorbike Club, a gay S&M group, then the Rocky Mountaineer Motorcycle Club in Colorado. 

He experimented with nipple and genital piercings before using those roots in the leather scene to pursue piercing on a broader level, after moving to West Hollywood. He met Richard Simonton, also known under the pseudonym Doug Malloy, who spent his life engulfed in alternative lifestyles, wrote the short, mostly fictional autobiography released as The Art of Pierced Penises and Decorative Tattoos, and ultimately fronted Ward the money to start Gauntlet.

A third name often mentioned in this early history of modern body piercing, Fakir Musafar (born Roland Loomis) began documenting his piercing and body modification practices as a teen, often exploring it alongside kink, gender presentation, and gender identity. He began exploring body modification as a teen, in the 1940s, for which he legitimately feared could lead to being institutionalized, and later flirted heavily with what he called “body play,” often having his waist cinched tight, among other practices.

Musafar’s approach is often critiqued, as a white man who cited Native Americans as inspiration for his exploration. Anthropologist Daniel Rosenblatt spoke on Musafar’s dialogue and writing around body modification as, ”the whole history of Western speculation about other cultures … tossed into a blender with more than a little New Age mysticism and some contemporary sexual radicalism thrown in.” 

He ultimately worked with Ward to help produce the initial issues of the Piercing Fans International Quarterly (PFIQ) magazine, the first piercing and body modification magazine, as a person with increased access to photography and articles on the subject.

The inaugural issue features an illustration of a beefy, tattooed man in a harness, arms chained together, penis on full display donning a Prince Albert piercing.

The magazine persisted, and the studio grew over time from a small space and jewelry manufacturer in Los Angeles to include locations in San Francisco, New York, a franchise in Paris, sitting beside a huge jewelry manufacturing operation. 

Piercing culture did not marry itself to tattooing or fall under that larger body modification umbrella we often see today until the mid-90s, when the heteronormative mainstream began to embrace it. Before that, piercing as a whole often was tied to queerness, kink, and alternative culture, and though body piercing expanded over time to queer communities across the U.S., Ward was well aware of how it was perceived. 

In one of his Body Modification Ezine columns, part of his series “Running the Gauntlet,” Ward said he became paranoid being part of the industry in the 80s, in that some “authoritarian agency might decide what we were doing what somehow criminal,” in relation to the studio and the magazine.

“It was the mid 80s, and the government had started cracking down on S/M publications. I took a long, hard look at the material I was publishing, asking myself if there was anything in PFIQ that might come under attack.”

The publication experienced censorship in Japan, Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, regularly seized by customs agents and regarded as indecent.

Gauntlet published a total of 50 PFIQ issues, and it wasn’t until 1998 when Gauntlet closed up shop over bankruptcy, the court also seized the rights to the PFIQ. Nearly six years later, the trustee took steps to dispose of the property and put it up for auction on eBay. 

An anonymous bidder placed the winning bid and sold it to Ward and his partner for $1. “It brings a tear to my eye every time I think about what has happened over the years. Jim has done so much for me and others that words could never be put forth in this format … Now, it’s time to give him something,” the bidder says in an email prior to the auction.

“It is without question one of the most generous gifts I have ever received,” Ward says.

Ward has since been inducted into the Leather Hall of Fame and the Society of Janus (a BDSM organization) Hall of Fame. In their 2004 documentary The Social History of Piercing, MTV dubbed him “the granddaddy of the modern body piercing movement.”

While body piercing and body modification has a deeply storied history, with the undeniable visibility and increased acceptance of body piercing in today’s modern world, there is no denying it would not have happened the same way without people in early queer and kink culture, like Jim Ward.