"Born in 1952 in Southern California, Richard Bernstein was raised by a single mom and fell in love with the performing arts while his brothers all pursued sports. After school, he eventually got a sales job with the studio 20th Century Fox, which relocated him to San Francisco at the dawn of the gay sexual revolution."
"But it wasn't until he moved to Los Angeles that he started getting paid for it. He casually posed for a flyer of a friend's nightclub, which led to other, more risqué modeling, which led to hustling, which led to his work with Colt Films, one of the trailblazers of gay erotica. And that's when Mickey Squires was born."
"For the otherwise reserved Richard Bernstein, there was a thrill in that, yet there was an incongruousness that came with having to live up to the idea everyone had of him. 'I thought it was a joke,' Bernstein admits in the documentary. 'I was laughing that they thought I was this sex person and I wasn't, I was Richard, who's not really'"
Richard Bernstein, born in 1952 in Southern California, pursued performing arts while his brothers focused on sports. After working for 20th Century Fox, he relocated to San Francisco during the gay sexual revolution and immersed himself in the LGBTQ+ community. Moving to Los Angeles, he began modeling for a nightclub flyer, which led to increasingly explicit work with Colt Films, a pioneering gay erotica studio. This launched the persona of Mickey Squires, who became a celebrated sex symbol throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the public adoration, Bernstein experienced tension between his manufactured image and his private identity, finding humor in the disconnect between the fantasy others projected onto him and his authentic self.
Read at Queerty
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