Fakir Musafar was born Roland Edmund Loomis in Aberdeen, South Dakota on August 10, 1930. Before severing in the Army during the Korean War, he received a bachelor's degree in education from Northern State Teachers College in 1952. H received a master's degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University in 1956. He worked as a dance teacher and in advertising for technology companies. As a child he became fascinated by articles and photographs in National Geographic and other magazines about so-called primitive cultures. He first pierced his genitals at the age of 14. It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for piercing, branding, tattooing, suspension, corseting and other practices he called body play. He changed his name in 1977 and became a performance artist and passionate body-play advocate. He wrote about the movement in magazines, gave interviews for books including Modern Primitives, showed his photographs of body modification in art galleries and online, and appeared in television news segments and documentaries. In the 1990s, he published a magazine entitled Body Play and Modern Primitives. He died from lung cancer on August 1, 2018 at the age of 87.
