Bob Flanagan (December 26, 1952 – January 4, 1996) was an American performance artist and writer whose work braided sadomasochism with the fact of living—and dying—with cystic fibrosis. For BDSM audiences he is not a metaphor. He is the man who nailed his genitals to a board while singing "If I Had a Hammer," who spent museum hours in a hospital bed inside a fake pediatric ward with a torture chamber in the cheer, and who let Nine Inch Nails film a machine actually piercing, stretching, and crushing him for "Happiness in Slavery." The illness was not a costume. The SM was not a side hobby. They were the same practice. He wrote as well as he performed: poems, slave sonnets, a fuck journal, an unpublished medicine manuscript, and a pain diary that ran up to the year he died. Rose is not a footnote in that résumé. She is the collaborator, the mistress in the contract, and the person who hoisted him as an inverted Christ for Godflesh.
Costa Mesa childhood, CF, and the poetry circuit
Flanagan was born in New York City on December 26, 1952, and grew up in Costa Mesa, California, with his mother Kathy, father Robert, brothers John and Tim, and sister Patricia. He was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis in childhood. Patricia died of the same disease at 21. A second sister died of it soon after birth. In 1967, at fourteen, he 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 in the community at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center. His first book, The Kid is the Man, came out from Bombshelter Press in 1978. In 1980 he met Sheree Rose. They collaborated closely for the rest of his life. Through the 1980s the couple focused on BDSM community education and organizing and were founding members of the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Janus. That detail matters for scene history: before the museum pieces and the banned videos, Flanagan and Rose were doing local SM education, not only gallery shock.
Nailed, Visiting Hours, and the hospital-bed installation
Their performance-art turn starts with Nailed in 1989, shown with the release of RE/Search’s Modern Primitives. In that piece Flanagan nailed his penis and scrotum to a board while singing "If I Had a Hammer." Visiting Hours, first shown at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in 1992, mixed text, video, and live presence and treated illness and SM as one subject. It became his most widely toured museum show. At the center of the gallery he lay in a hospital bed and talked with visitors for the run of the exhibit. Curator Laura Trippi described the installation as a crazy stage set of a children’s residential hospital, complete with a torture chamber lurking in the institutional cheer. In 1996 he received the Steve Maidhof Award for National or International Work from the National Leather Association International.
The 1994 iteration, Visiting Hours: An Installation by Bob Flanagan in collaboration with Sheree Rose, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the New Museum, turned the Santa Monica space into a medical clinic—waiting-room furniture, potted plants, copies of Highlights For Children. Other selected pieces include A Matter of Choice with Rose at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in July 1992; Bob Flanagan at the Movies at Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco on April 18, 1992; Bob Flanagan’s Sick at Art in the Anchorage, New York, in August 1991—a voice-over reading of the actual mistress/slave contract he and Rose had written; and Tell Me What to Do: An Improvisational Reading and Performance at Beyond Baroque in Venice on August 14, 1987.
Music videos: Nine Inch Nails, Danzig, Godflesh
Flanagan is the body in 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. In 1993 he appeared in Danzig’s "It’s Coming Down." In the uncensored ending he pierces his upper and lower lips together, then hammers a nail through the head of his penis and bleeds onto the camera lens. He also had a small role in Godflesh’s "Crush My Soul" video as an upside-down suspended Christ, hoisted to a church ceiling by Sheree Rose.
Death, SICK, and the books
On January 4, 1996, Flanagan died of cystic-fibrosis complications at 43. He was survived by his wife and closest collaborator, Sheree Rose. He is buried in the chapel of Forest Lawn Cemetery. The last years of his life, including the death itself, are the subject of Kirby Dick’s documentary SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Flanagan’s condition for being in the film was that his death be part of the finished work.
The partial bibliography: The Kid Is the Man (1978), The Wedding of Everything (1983), Slave Sonnets (1986), Fuck Journal (Hanuman Books, 1988), A Taste of Honey with David Trinidad (1990), Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist (1993, interviews), Pain Journal (1996), and The Book of Medicine, a manuscript that was never published. Archives and further viewing include the Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose Collection at the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, excerpts from the Pain Journal, holdings at the Video Data Bank, and an IMDb page. For this site Flanagan is the writer-performer who made cystic fibrosis and consensual masochism occupy the same bed: Society of Janus organizing, hammered genitals, museum visitors at the rails, a NIN machine that did not fake the pain, and a documentary he would only join if it showed him dying. The dates to keep: born December 26, 1952; poster child in 1967; Los Angeles in 1976; first book 1978; Rose in 1980; Janus chapter work through the 1980s; Nailed 1989; Visiting Hours from 1992 and the 1994 museum double; Maidhof Award 1996; dead January 4, 1996, at 43, Forest Lawn chapel. The videos to keep: NIN’s unsimulated machine, Danzig’s nailed glans and lip-to-lip pierce, Godflesh’s ceiling Christ. That is Bob Flanagan for a BDSM readership—writer, organizer, supermasochist, and the man who made cystic fibrosis part of the scene’s public image instead of a secret behind the play.
