Fakir Musafar first found pleasure in pain as a teenager named Roland Loomis in his family’s basement in the mid-1940s.

It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for piercing, branding, tattooing, suspension, corseting and other outré practices that he would come to call “body play.” After years of conducting these activities in secret, away from society’s judgmental gaze, he changed his professional name and became a performance artist and passionate body-play advocate.

Mr. Musafar’s efforts helped create the modern primitive movement, whose name he claimed to have coined in an article he wrote in the late 1970s. He shared modern primitivism with the world by performing, publishing a magazine devoted to it and teaching classes on branding and piercing until shortly before his death on Aug. 1 at his home in Menlo Park, Calif. He was 87.

The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, who is professionally known as Cléo Dubois, a former dominatrix who teaches consensual bondage, discipline and sadomasochism.