For other persons with similar names see Bob Flanagan (disambiguation).

Bob Flanagan (December 27 1952 – January 4 1996) was an American writer, poet, musician, performance artist, and comic.

He was born in New York City and grew up in Glendale, California. He studied literature at California State University, Long Beach and the University of California, Irvine. He moved to Los Angeles in 1976. In 1978, he published his first book, The Kid Is A Man. He also worked with the improv comedy group The Groundlings.

Flanagan was born with cystic fibrosis and used BDSM to control his pain, and inform his art. An older sister, Patricia, died of cystic fibrosis in 1979, aged 21.

He was the subject of the documentary SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1997) a film by Kirby Dick, which films the final years of Bob's life.



Flanagan is featured in the widely banned music video for the song "Happiness in Slavery" by Nine Inch Nails. In the video, he plays a character who worships a machine. He offers a candle to an altar, before ceremonially undressing and washing. The slave (Bob) then lies down on an intelligent torture machine that molests and ultimately kills him, all with a mixture of pain and pleasure on his face.

In 1993 he also appeared in the video for the Danzig song "It's Coming Down". In the uncensored version of the video, Flanagan hammers a nail through the head of his penis before urinating on the lens of the camera recording him.

He also had a bit part in Godflesh's Crush my Soul video, as a suitably blasphemous, upside-down suspended Christ, hoisted on to the ceiling of a Cathedral by his wife Sheree Rose.

While some of his performances were notable for acts of extreme masochism (on at least one occasion he hammered a nail through his penis, while cracking jokes), he also wrote rather clever, humorous songs, many of them intended as much for children as adults.

His latest posthumous piece by Sheree Rose entitled Bobaloon, was shown in Japan, featuring a 20 foot tall inflatable Flanagan complete with pierced penis, ball gag and straitjacket.

On January 4 1996, he died of cystic fibrosis, aged 43.

* The Wedding of Everything (1983) * The Kid is the Man (1978) * Slave Sonnets (1986) * Fuck Journal (Hanuman Press, c. 1990) * A Taste of Honey with David Trinidad (1990) * Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist (1993) (interviews) * Pain Journal(1996)

---- * Bob Flanagan: brief biography on Terminals, UCLA. Accessed 14 October 2006.

* Obituary * From the Poetry Journal * Excerpts from Flanagan's Pain Journal * Why (poem answering the question of Flanagan's lifestyle)

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