Fakir Musafar, a gasp-inducing practitioner and leading advocate of “body play” — the term he used to describe piercing, branding, tattooing, footbinding, corseting, body suspension and other ...

Fakir Musafar, an icon of the modern body modification culture, died at his home in Menlo Park August 1. He announced in May that he was fighting advanced lung cancer. He was 87. Born Roland Loomis, ...

A neck coiled with rope. A waist cinched with a leather belt. Lips clipped with clothes pins. Nipples festooned with fishing lures. To behold the early photographic self-portraits of Fakir Musafar, ...

I'm making plans for my trip to a conference called Thunder in the Mountains. Thunder is always my favorite leather conference, but this year's going to be extra-intense. Max and I will be ...

Alongside the jewelry in the display cases of Rockstar, the piercing shop on Thayer Street, there hangs a picture of a man with long spikes protruding from each side of his chest. The spikes project ...

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Fakir Musafar first found pleasure in pain as a teenager named Ronald Loomis in his family’s basement in the mid-1940s. It was the ...

Fakir Musafar first found pleasure in pain as a teenager named Roland Loomis in his family’s basement in the mid-1940s. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for piercing, branding, tattooing, ...

I returned from the leather conference called Thunder in the Mountains two weeks ago, and since then, alert readers have been e-mailing me, asking, "Did you do the energy pull with Fakir Musafar? How ...