Daniel Wenger of the New Yorker magazine writes:
Given Mizer’s Greek-warrior fixation, it’s tempting to think of him as one early source of the “body fascism” for which contemporary gay-male culture is often maligned. But Mizer didn’t seem to harbor animosity for “sissies”; his hatred was for the world’s hatred, and he used physical fitness as a tool of survival in perniciously polite society. Mizer’s achievement, as a photographer and a publisher, was to take the standards of male beauty as they existed and prove that gay men could satisfy them, and be satisfied by them, too.