Was robert mapplethorpe gay

Published in:November-December 2008 issue.

 

IN PURELY VISUAL TERMS, they appeared to be an odd couple. With his exceptionally handsome confront etched deeply with a desirable masculine divinity, and held gracefully atop a tall, impeccably dressed build, Sam Wagstaff exuded sophistication, style, education, old wealth, and confidence, while his slim younger partner, dressed rebelliously in denim and silver-studded black leather, seemed vaguely edgy and preoccupied. Robert Mapplethorpe did not appear to fit comfortably among the guests gathered at a cocktail party on Gramercy Park East that prior fall evening of 1975, and gave the slightest mark that he’d rather be elsewhere.

As the hostess was a longtime friend of my former boyfriend and me, she had invited us together, as we were at that time attempting what proved to be an unsuccessful reconciliation after a summer breakup. But having spent a rare months as a single 26-year-old same-sex attracted man, I’d learned to stretch my wings and liked the freedom. So my senses were equally though discreetly attuned toward men I found attractive, funny, and interesting.

Robert Mapplethorpe and I shared a not many words of introduction, but I felt no p

was robert mapplethorpe gay

Robert Mapplethorpe

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Robert Mapplethorpe, 'Larry and Bobby kissing', 1979. Gift of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and to the J. Paul Getty Trust © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. Used by permission
Visibly queer

As writer Philip Gefter has deposit it, gay animation in New York in the 1970s was ‘downtown, out of sight and after hours’.

Mapplethorpe was not the first artist to photograph the male nude in homoerotic ways – the art-historically well informed Mapplethorpe knew of the work of Thomas Eakins, George Platt Lynes and Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden, indeed often directly quoting their work in his compositions – but he was perhaps the first to consistently put the homoerotic up front and centre in galleries and museums. When Mapplethorpe exhibited photographs of the men from the West Village lgbtq+ bars he regularly cruised, he exposed a hidden underground world to wider straight society.

Mapplethorpe would invite men back home both for pleasure and to act as his models. At his loft, the encounters often slipped be

Mapplethorpe was interested in self and amongst his enormous oeuvre he took multiple portraits, and many self portraits. He was same-sex attracted, however he initially tried to bury this aspect of himself and conform, but eventually ended up making images that are highly charged, homoerotic in nature, that still hold the power to shock, and, over the years, have often been banned from display.

Mapplethorpe grew up in the rebellious years, when the civil rights movement in America was active, gay liberation was starting, the birth-pill became available, and gay pornographic films became mainstream (Deep Throat). He was born into a middle-class family and was said to be a socially awkward teenager. Initially at college he was part of a right wing, strongly heterosexual group, but gradually became more interested in the counterculture movement, started using drugs and became interested in the Cubists and Surrealists. He also met Patti Smith who became a huge guide and support in his life. He initially made mixed media and collage artworks, often based on religious iconography (although with erotic overtones).  He had been brought up Catholic, with all the colour, pomp and rituals of that fa

“Perfection. That’s the Mapplethorpe characteristic,” says Robert Mapplethorpe’s younger brother Edward Maxey as he leans back in his chair, his chin piercing catching the light.
He, along with creator Sandy Daley, singer Debbie Harry and art critic Carol Squiers, are just some of the host of artists and friends interviewed in a compelling new film available to view in cinemas from 22 April.
The film’s directors, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, follow Mapplethorpe’s animation from his Catholic childhood upbringing through to his final days in Fresh York, charting how the bisexual man from Queens, NY, became perhaps the most controversial photographer in history.
We start in Los Angeles, 1989, amid the violent protests provoked by Mapplethorpe’s deeply controversial erotic imagery he displayed at his self-curated concluding show, The Perfect Moment, at the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

We then cut to the present day, to the serene J. Paul Getty Museum. There, curator Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen, head of photography and curator at LACMA, delicately unwrap Mapplethorpe’s archived black and white prints in preparation for the two retrospective exhibitions of

History

Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989) moved to the fifth floor loft at 24 Bond Road, in what was still an industrial area in lower Manhattan, in October 1972. The young painter bought the space, converting much of it to a studio and darkroom, with money given to him by Sam Wagstaff, the influential art curator and collector. Wagstaff, Mapplethorpe’s patron, mentor, and long-term boyfriend, would later buy Mapplethorpe an apartment at 35 West 23rd Street, allowing Mapplethorpe to keep 24 Bond Street as a workspace until his death due to AIDS-related complications in 1989.

Of his hometown, Floral Park, Long Island, Mapplethorpe once quipped, “it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave.” Moving to Brooklyn in the early 1960s, Mapplethorpe studied drawing, painting and sculpture at Pratt Institute where he met his soul-mate and muse, the punk poet and performer Patti Smith. By the end of the decade he and Smith moved to the Chelsea Hotel, where they occupied its smallest room. At this point in his skilled career, Mapplethorpe was using images he found in gay porn magazines to create collages with various materials. Mapplethorpe’s