Rio Reiser was born in Berlin in 1950. His father was an engineer for cardboard packaging at Siemens AG. The family had to move several times as a result of his transfers. Thus the family lived in West Berlin, Traunreut, Nuremberg, Brühl, Fellbach and Rodgau. His brothers are Peter Möbius (1941-2020) and Gert Möbius.

Reiser dropped out of school at the ''Melanchthon Gymnasium'' in Nuremberg to train in a photography studio in Offenbach-Bieber. He taught himself to play the cello, guitar, piano and other instruments. He changed his civil name to Rio Reiser in reference to the main character of the psychological novel Anton Reiser by Karl Philipp Moritz. In his youth, he was a fan of the Beatles and later the Rolling Stones.

Around 1970 he had his coming out and lived openly gay in his private circle of friends. He did not publicly address his relationships with men until the mid-1980s; from 1986, he began to comment on them in interviews and talk shows.[1]