Bob Flanagan: Cystic Fibrosis, Consensual Masochism, and Happiness in Slavery

Bob Flanagan was born in New York City on December 26, 1952, and grew up in Costa Mesa, California. Cystic fibrosis sat over his childhood. His mother Kathy and father Robert raised him with brothers John and Tim and sister Patricia. The disease took two female relatives: Patricia died at 21, and another sister died soon after birth. In 1967, at fourteen, Flanagan became the first poster child for the North Orange County chapter of the National Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation. He graduated from Costa Mesa High School and studied literature at California State University, Long Beach and the University of California, Irvine. In 1976 he moved to Los Angeles. By the mid-1970s he was reading poems around Southern California and working at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center. His first book, The Kid is the Man, came out from Bombshelter Press in 1978.

The hinge of his career was 1980, when he met Sheree Rose. They stayed partners and collaborators for the rest of his life. Through the 1980s they were BDSM educators and organizers in Los Angeles and founding members of the local Society of Janus chapter. Before the museum pieces and the banned videos, they were already doing local SM education and scene building. The turn from poetry into performance art peaked with Nailed in 1989, the same year RE/Search published Modern Primitives: Flanagan nailed his penis and scrotum to a board while singing “If I Had a Hammer,” freezing the mix of bodily pain and art that defined him.

Visiting Hours opened at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1992 and became his most widely toured museum show. It mixed text, video, and live presence and treated illness and SM as one subject. At the center of the gallery he lay in a hospital bed and talked with visitors. Curator Laura Trippi described the installation as a crazy stage set of a children’s residential hospital, with a torture chamber under the institutional cheer. In 1994 the same piece returned at Santa Monica and the New Museum, the space dressed as a clinic with waiting-room furniture, potted plants, and copies of Highlights For Children. Other selected works include A Matter of Choice with Rose at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in July 1992, and Bob Flanagan’s Sick at Art in the Anchorage, New York, in August 1991, where a voice-over read the mistress/slave contract he and Rose had written.

One of his best-known screen appearances is the widely banned video for Nine Inch Nails’ “Happiness in Slavery.” Nude, he is bound to a mechanical torture device that pierces his flesh, pulls his nipples and penis with pincers, crushes his genitals with a paddle, and finally “kills” him. Except for that on-screen death, the acts are not simulated. He also appears in the uncensored ending of Danzig’s “It’s Coming Down,” piercing his upper and lower lips together, then hammering a nail through the head of his penis so blood hits the lens. In Godflesh’s “Crush My Soul” he is an upside-down Christ, hoisted to a church ceiling by Sheree Rose. The images are shock, and they are also the body that lived with the disease.

On January 4, 1996, Flanagan died of cystic-fibrosis complications at 43. He is buried in the chapel of Forest Lawn Cemetery. His widow and closest collaborator was Sheree Rose. Kirby Dick’s documentary SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist covers the last years and the death itself. Flanagan’s condition for appearing was that his death had to be in the finished film. His books include The Kid Is the Man (1978), The Wedding of Everything (1983), Slave Sonnets (1986), Fuck Journal (1988), Pain Journal (1996), and A Taste of Honey with David Trinidad (1990). For a BDSM readership he is the writer-performer who put cystic fibrosis and negotiated masochism in the same bed: Janus organizing, hammered genitals, museum visitors at the bed rails, a machine that did not fake the pain, and a documentary he would only join if it showed him dying.