Documentary: ‘Mickey & Richard’ Explores Man Behind The ’80s Sex Symbol

In the ’70s & ’80s, Mickey Squires appeared in numerous adult films and erotic magazine spreads emerging as a mustachioed beefcake sex symbol.

The new documentary, Mickey & Richard, takes a deep dive into the man behind the uber-masculine image.

Check out the teaser trailer for Mickey & Richard below:

Via Queerty:

Born in 1952 in Southern California, Richard Bernstein was raised by a single mom and feel 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.

Already aware he was gay, Squires quickly took to the city’s burgeoning LGBTQ+ community and found his “team”— like-minded men he could connect with, party with, work out with, and sleep with.

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.

Before long, Mickey’s face—and body—was everywhere, the subject of every gay’s fantasies. 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.

Bernstein shares in the doc-film, “I thought it was a joke. I was laughing that they thought I was this sex person and I wasn’t. I was Richard, who’s not really that sexual.”

“Very few people saw the other side of me as Richard,” he adds. “Except for my very close friends, everybody else who met me thought that I was Mickey Squires 24/7. I couldn’t live up to the image that I created!”

Through Bernstein’s narration and archival footage, Mickey & Richard explores his journey as a masculine, gay sex symbol through the turbulent ’80s and the AIDS crisis, when being gay (and gay sex) were deeply stigmatized.

The documentary premiered last month at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and lands in London for the BFI Flare LGBTQ+ Festival on March 19 & 20.