A Body to Live In (2025), the new documentary directed by Angelo Madsen, focuses on the life of Fakir Musafar and his pursuit of spiritual fulfillment through various forms of body modification. Born Roland Loomis near a reservation in South Dakota, Musafar began his body experiments early and documented them photographically. Waiting until his parents were out of town, he cinched his waist, pinched his flesh with clothespin, and simulated the effect of tattoos using ink stamps. Unleashed into San Francisco in the 1950s to pursue graduate education in theater design at San Francisco State, Musafar befriended others interested in esoteric spirituality, including Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in 1966; Doug Malloy and Jim Ward, with whom he founded the first piercing studio in the 1970s; and Ron Athey, the performance artist with whom he performed occasionally in the 1980s and 1990s. Musafar also found himself drawn more deeply toward Indigenous spiritual practices—such as the Native American Sun Dance, historically performed by the Plains Indians, which involves piercing, suspension, and fasting—and he devoted more effort to integrate these rituals into the local communities of which he was a part, despite admonishment by Native communities and tribal leaders. For Musafar, these practices were integral to his own preparations for death.
In making sense of Musafar’s life and the complex times in which it was embedded, Madsen offers several key genealogies. One is the history of the proliferation of body modification within U.S. subcultures throughout the twentieth century. Although Musafar’s story began as a solo pursuit, Madsen quickly expands the frame to include not only his long-term lovers Cleo and Alam, but also the connections—spiritual and otherwise—that pulse beneath piercing and tattooing culture, punk, and BDSM. The film also bears witness to shifts within the LGBTQI community, for instance the brief burst of freely flowing eroticism within the radical faeries in the late 1970s, followed by the toll of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s onwards, producing communities of care and activism as well as torrents of grief and memorialization. We even catch glimpses of the commodification of sexuality, as kink moves from underground clubs to the contemporary art mainstream. We also see Musafar grow to embrace his own gender fluidity and non-binary tendencies. In Madsen’s telling, Musafar’s life offers a connective thread between each of these elements, producing its own fascinating and important recent history of queer life.
The film also historicizes the central investigation into spirituality and consciousness that formed the focus of Musafar’s life. Biographically, an initial fascination with ritual in the Lutheran Church shifted into more exploratory modes as Musafar looked toward his Native neighbors and their practices, as well as to his subscription of National Geographic. While this pivot to exoticism was hailed in the 1970s, it seems more inappropriate in the contemporary moment. Musafar did not seem to grasp the problem during his lifetime (something Cleo attributes to his having been born in 1930), and the film entertains his self-mythologization through voiceovers that have been culled from archival interviews and interviews with collaborators and loved ones (Madsen began this project after Musafar’s 2018 death). But the film also challenges Musafar by allowing us to hear from others within his circle who describe deliberately missing opening rituals because they felt uncomfortable, as well as from Native activists who criticize the sensational aspects of his engagement. His own performance of the Sun Dance, especially as captured on film in Dances Sacred and Profane (1985) is untethered from core elements of their spiritual practice.
The film’s most intriguing complication of Musafar’s self-framing, however, comes from Musafar himself, via the self-portraits that he took throughout his life. In fact, two of them—photographs taken in 1944—are the first thing we see on the screen. These images show Musafar in white underwear with faint stamps on his torso, a thick black belt firmly and tightly cinched around his waist, and a heavy rope coiled multiple times around his neck—as if it were a neckpiece. In one photograph, he looks up; in the other, he looks directly at the camera. This is only the beginning, however. Other archival images show Musafar undergoing various forms of bodily modification, sometimes wearing women’s clothing, but always posed provocatively. Initially taken for himself, some of his self-portraits were later published in magazines. They received fan mail (including from Annie Sprinkle, with whom he began a correspondence and then brief romance). These images even gave Musafar currency in the contemporary art market, in which he began to circulate as an “outsider” artist in the 1990s.
As Madsen suggests, the camera was a part of how Musafar fused eroticism and spirituality. But the camera also captures contradictions in Musafar’s project. Does he take pleasure in the plasticity of his body itself, or does he take pleasure in showing off the plasticity of his body, the possibility of transformation, to an external gaze? His delight in himself as performer and framer of the narrative muddies his self-mythology of constantly yearning to connect his consciousness with the divine. Madsen hints at this tension throughout the film, highlighting moments when a theatrical impulse might seem more salient than a spiritual one. We learn that Musafar spent much of his youth performing magic tricks for cash. He described his coming out as one imbued with circus energy. And his taking the name Fakir Musafar coincided with a performance at the 1977 International Tattoo Convention in Reno where he lay on a bed of nails and inserted daggers into his chest, entangling spectacle, eroticism, and spirituality.
In presenting Musafar’s internal complexities, A Body to Live In allows the audience to ponder their own relationships to spirituality. What really is the relationship between spirituality and performance? Must relationships with the divine remain consigned to the sphere of the private? Are these technologies of self-making and self-preservation their own form of spirituality?
An extended scene late in the film features an older Musafar with another lover, Grin, preparing for a two-point chest suspension. The three engage tenderly as Musafar offers advice to both Cleo and Grin on how to manipulate the equipment and control the experience. Once Grin is suspended, the camera is trained on his face and we watch for transformation, aware that this is not exactly a private moment, but one documented for posterity. Similarly, A Body to Live In would not exist at all if Musafar’s own life had not been documented so extensively. Is this material offering evidence of transformation and/or is it a manifestation of a person’s fervent wish to be seen?
Although the film does not make an explicit statement on the matter, it does conclude with a quote from Susan Sontag: “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality … time’s relentless melt … an incitement to reverie.” Whose reverie, we might ask? His or ours? Or was the reverie ever his, when the rituals he drew upon so often appropriated the Native traditions of others? Rituals gain meaning in communities where they are shared, as Musafar did with Grin and Cleo and others. Perhaps what defines Musafar’s intensive quest is a never-finished search for a community that could bear witness to his own transformation, whether longing for the practices of the reservation he grew up next to, but not on, or whether coming out to a queer underground that was still never quite enough. Now A Body to Live In incites one last community—us, the audience—to ask, today, where the ceremony must be found.1
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Endnotes
- I am riffing on Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2 12, no. 3 (1984): 19-70.
Amber Jamilla Musser