Robert mapplethorpe gay
Robert Mapplethorpe: From suburbia to subversive gay icon
Witness programme, BBC World Service
Thirty years ago the controversial American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe had a major exhibition at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan. It contained several of his trademark explicit shots of nudes - and it was confirmation that despite or because of the controversy, he'd become a star of the art world.
A few months later he was deceased.
Mapplethorpe set out to shock America - yet his sister Nancy recalls a 'totally ordinary childhood' just outside New York.
Nancy Rooney has spent almost all her life on Long Island. As Nancy Mapplethorpe she grew up in Floral Park, the neighbourhood on the fringes of New York Capital which her parents moved to in 1949.
Nancy was the first of six children. "My brother Robert was only minor when we moved to a brand new property on a brand recent block. We did what young kids did in the early 50s: we jumped rope and played stickball and marbles. It was a totally common childhood."
"Our father Harry was kind of strict and he worked as an engineer at Underwriters Lab
Llittle did Lloyd Ziff know that when he took half a roll of 35mm film to his friend’s apartment in the slow 60s, he was actually capturing two of America’s most iconic figures. These “beautiful and intense” people living next door were Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith; so enamoured with them, Ziff knew he had to ask them if he could take their portraits. Of course, they happily obliged.
Mapplethorpe was in fact also a student at the Pratt Institute where Ziff was studying, and they would later become friends and collaborators until Mapplethorpe’s passing in 1989. But that initial meeting was in 1967, a time of free love, experimentation and convert, and one of anonymity before Robert and Patti’s careers blossomed; while they were just kids figuring it all out. The resulting images, cited by Smith as the first-ever portraits taken of them as a couple, offer a candid insight into the pair’s intimate relationship – as friends, lovers, skilled collaborators and soul mates. Collected within Ziff’s recent book, Desire, the photographs feature alongsidecontact sheets, personal notes, and photos of skylines and streets that were bustling with potential in the years during an
Published in:November-December 2008 issue.
IN PURELY VISUAL TERMS, they appeared to be an odd couple. With his exceptionally handsome face etched deeply with a desirable masculine divinity, and held gracefully atop a tall, impeccably dressed build, Sam Wagstaff exuded sophistication, taste, training, old money, and confidence, while his slim younger partner, dressed rebelliously in denim and silver-studded jet 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 in advance fall evening of 1975, and gave the slightest impression that he’d rather be elsewhere.
As the hostess was a longtime comrade of my former girlfriend 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 few months as a single 26-year-old lgbtq+ 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 few words of introduction, but I felt no
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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 permissionVisibly queer
As writer Philip Gefter has put it, gay existence in New York in the 1970s was ‘downtown, out of sight and after hours’.
Mapplethorpe was not the first creator to photograph the male nude in homoerotic ways – the art-historically adequately 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 position the homoerotic up front and centre in galleries and museums. When Mapplethorpe exhibited photographs of the men from the West Village gay bars he regularly cruised, he exposed a hidden underground planet to wider straight community.
Mapplethorpe would invite men back home both for pleasure and to execute as his models. At his loft, the enc
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