“These Days I’m So Far Removed From Mickey Squires”: Gay Adult Film Star Richard Bernstein Is Healing His Wounds

Masking as the gay model Mickey Squires, the adult film star has seen the analogue glory days of vintage erotica and the advancements of an age run by digital smut. Speaking to Man About Town, he shares his struggles and finds personal acceptance in a revealing new documentary portrait.

As gay cinema of the digital generation pushes further into provocative territory, from the escort escapades of Ruaridh Mollica in 2024’s Sebastian, to an already-controversial spin on the adult industry with the yet-to-be-released Blue Film, starring Kieron Moore, a Wohler Films collaboration between documentary filmmaker Ryan A. White and artist A.P. Pickle that embraces an entirely different direction. Producing erotic archival projects since 2015, the White and Pickle continue their exploration of lesser-known chapters of queer history with Mickey & Richard. To date, it has received premieres at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR); Zurich’s Pink Apple; Sunny Bunny, Ukraine’s first queer film festival; and the 40th edition of BFI Flare, London’s leading LGBTQIA+ film festival.

Looking backwards at a bygone age where the most accessible means of gay pornography came in the form of newsstand magazine-flicking and VHS tape-hoarding, White and Pickle excavate a glorious analogue world of Reagan-era erotica lost to time. At the centre of it all is the film’s subject Richard Bernstein, better known to the curious community as “Mickey Squires”, one of the defining faces of pre-internet gay porn. Examining the blurred line between real-life mundanity and flashbulb fantasy, Bernstein’s unravelling reckons with thoughtful, considered conversations on surviving the height of the AIDS epidemic, and the strange ageing afterlife of becoming an icon in his early thirties. Speaking to the 78-year-old globetrotter over Zoom is equally enlightening, at most heartwarming, even if he is fighting off a cold.

Living a quiet life in Palm Springs, Bernstein has returned home to California after a short London stay. His attendance at the Mickey & Richard festival screenings marks a return to the public spotlight, so to speak, though his surroundings are hardly unfamiliar territory. “This is my seventh trip in eight and a half years,” he shares. Last year, he caught Hercules in the West End. Bernstein has always dreamt of being on Broadway; one lyric in particular from the Disney movie-musical has stayed with him for life. “‘Go the Distance’ is my song, the line in there, ‘I would go most anywhere / To find where I belong,’ that’s the story of my life.” With the same cadence of his Hercules narration in the closing scenes of Mickey & Richard, Bernstein is someone who really believes he belongs where he is in his life right now.

This search for true belonging was decades in the making. A “lanky, skinny kid” from Long Beach, Bernstein got a gig at UCLA as the token white guy in an all Black cheer squad. Frankly, not good at sports but really good at being in front of a camera, he “wanted to show the best face possible” and began to take working out seriously. On his modelling career, “I never looked at my proofs because I didn’t want to see the bad pictures. They’re the professionals, so I trusted them to the extent that I felt that their taste level for me was going to be right.”

For much of his adult life, audiences knew Bernstein only as the Mickey Squires archetype: masculine, muscular, moustached. Splashed across Colt covers, celebrated in gay culture. He recalls coming from the gym one time in New York City and seeing rows of Mickey Squires magazines, Honcho and Blueboy, commanding a newsstand at 72nd Street station. A sign of overexposure, from ’80 to ’86, modelling paid all his bills. The legacy of Mickey Squires is predicated on the sexual revolution of his 70s San Fran heyday, yet Bernstein speaks on a very real misconception of escorts and porn workers. “I don’t think they glamourised it back then,” he ponders. “They thought we were all sluts and whores, and I wasn’t. I was always intelligent. That’s why when I met my clients and when I was escorting, they realised, ‘Oh, you’re someone I can talk to,’ besides someone to jerk off to.”

Scrambling for work to pay rent, once he started making money modelling, Bernstein and his painter’s pants pals “owned The Castro”, one of the first gay neighbourhoods in the US. “Maybe some of the boomers look down on me for doing what I did, but my friends never did. I think it’s important not to look down on people. People have to do whatever they can to make a living, and I’ve been very open-minded about that my whole life. I never regretted what I did, and I never regretted anybody else doing it, because you don’t know what they’re going through.”

Mickey Squires’ first wave came about in macho print features and Palm Drive Video, inadvertently producing storied artefacts of the pre-AIDS era. It all began with his first modelling gig, a 1980 Probe ‘Hoedown’ promotional flyer: “That picture of me with a straw in my mouth, and the hat, I mean, I could even look at that and say that’s a great picture. I can see myself on the big screen, I can fantasise, ‘Oh, I’m an actor in a movie.’” For Bernstein, his Mickey Squires introduction to Colt from photographer Jim French is “one of the best portraits” of him ever taken. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” he confesses. “That was a difficult picture to get. He had me in a pool, and he had me coming out of the pool, where my hair would go back 20 times at least. He was yelling at me; he was not happy with my forehead. My chin was up, my chin was down. But that picture is iconic.”

Bernstein is candid about feeling disconnected from that physically imposing image of self. “These days I’m so far removed from Mickey Squires,” he admits in his film. Discovering vintage scans of Mickey Squires on the algorithm might inspire total confidence, assuredness in one’s hypersexual heroism, but Bernstein openly discusses his insecurity and his difficulty in separating the performer from the person beneath the slick skin. Mickey Squires is positive, outward, and approachable. “With Richard, there was always sort of a wall, sexually and socially.”

Pornography and sex work functioned almost like acting for Bernstein, his Mickey persona serving more as a costume than an extension of his character. It’s likely why, observationally, Mickey & Richard deny the encyclopaedic expectation of an industry history class. Certainly curious, more than cynical, of today’s ever-changing digital sex landscape, he knows his way around the internet. The fact that free porn is as accessible as it is, everywhere at the click of a button, is, in fact, a good thing: “It’s funny, all these OnlyFans sites, they want you to pay. You don’t really have to pay for them, I mean, you can go on Pornhub or xHamster and find longer videos of them.”

Bernstein is also fully aware that a content creator with the Mickey Squires physique could likely monetise themselves far more successfully today than during the 1980s: “I didn’t make that much money off of my porn. If I had been out as Mickey Squires in my 80s form now, I would be making a fortune. But it’s just the time that you’re born into. My time was different; this time is different. It’s not necessarily bad, it’s just different.”

By contrast, what feels strange for Bernstein is the way in which gay men interact with each other. Coming out at 19 in ‘69, up until Mickey Squires in the 80s, his gay dating fix was to go to the LA baths, the dance clubs and bars, not Grindr. What he admittedly finds “weird” is not the practice of casual sex itself, after all, he emerged from one of gay America’s most sexually liberated periods, but the disposable nature of a technological swipe culture. “I don’t want to always reject people,” speaking plainly about finding the act of going on dating apps intimidating.

Bernstein makes a point to underscore the importance of preserving Queer histories, especially those of the AIDS crisis. “If you don’t learn from history, you end up repeating it, that’s the old saying.” A history major in his youth, Bernstein is a curious individual with an inquiring mind, “always interested in hearing more about the gay culture” before and after his time. Plus, he is a survivor. He speaks openly about living with HIV for 30 years, and for nearly two decades undetectable: “The year I got diagnosed, the cocktail came out. My luck is very fortuitous that I was able to survive. All the men that I used to know in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, so many of them are gone. It’s such a shame because who knows what their lives would have been like? We wiped out a whole generation of gay men who could have contributed so much to the world, as all the gay men who lived have contributed so much.”

Aside from documented talk of cocaine addiction and financial troubles in the 80s, Bernstein regrets that despite years together with his late partner, Dan, who sadly lost his life to HIV, they never properly documented themselves as a couple. “Today, everybody’s taking pictures of themselves and selfies with people they’re with. We weren’t able to do that. So, I just, for some reason, never stopped somebody on the street and said, ‘Would you take a picture of us?’ We were together, and that was the relationship of my life.”

Bernstein sees survival itself as part of his responsibility in educating younger generations of gay men. In February 2025, Bernstein suffered a serious “widowmaker” heart attack. “Almost 70% of people pass on; they don’t survive.” Months of recovery forced him into another confrontation with ageing and mortality. Returning to his steady job at a 55-plus senior living centre for gay people, men and women, he found himself overwhelmed by the response of being hugged and being told he looks good. Despite a culmination of so many awful feelings about himself, people were happy he survived. “That’s important, to tell people I’m not hiding, I really am an open book,” he says. “I think it’s important for people to know that you can survive certain things and keep going and still be here and still contribute to, or be a part of, the queer community.”

Before Mickey Squires, Bernstein worked briefly in film distribution at 20th Century Fox. “As a kid, I would always go to the movies every Saturday and watch the matinees. To have a movie about me at this age, it’s just mind-boggling, it really is.” Initially, he resisted White and Pickle’s wishes to participate in Mickey & Richard entirely. “I was reticent at first to do it,” he says. “My Palm Drive career was never anything to shout about. [Jack Fritscher] released one video of mine called Foul-Mouth Linebacker. All the stuff that shows in the film about Palm Drive, I hadn’t seen that. That was just a surprise to me; I didn’t think I was important enough or had enough experience. We just got along so well, and they were so sweet and kind and open-minded and anxious to hear my story. That gave me the confidence to open up to them.”

In his mid-50s, the second wave of Mickey Squires saw “wonderful” muscle show hostings at bear events in Chicago and South Florida. Then came sporadic films in the 1990s, and subsequent popularity in the 2000s, thanks to the internet. “In my early seventies, I got a lot of requests to do daddy porn or do old man porn. As I talk in the film, I can’t look at myself in the mirror and see anything sexual about myself anymore. I did my last cover and photo spread at 55 in Bear Magazine. To me, this is the third wave, and it’s enough, I’m fine with it.”

A YouTube interview with Matt Cullen, which has amassed 276k views at the time of writing, opened up Bernstein’s eyes to his renown at this age. “I was so out of touch from my mid-fifties up until my early seventies, and then to have this come out… I can imagine other figures like myself are around, if they can get to know that their stories are probably just as entertaining and as emotional and as important as mine.”

Finally feeling secure in the hands of White and Pickle, Bernstein is eager to reconnect with his roots for the June premiere of Mickey & Richard, taking place at the 50th San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival, hosted by Frameline. He is relishing the doc festival circuit, but the end of Mickey Squires is near, it appears. “I don’t think there’s another wave coming, I can’t foresee it all, I really can’t,” he smiles. “I appreciate the people who have the gumption to just come up and tell me that they’ve seen my stuff, and they appreciate me, the fact that I’m still around.” Fourth wave or not, for generations of gay men to come, Bernstein is already immortalised as both Mickey Squires and the survivor beside him.