City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [109]
My main argument was that S&M was a scaled-down way of enacting and exorcising the brutality of our class society. As I put it, “Whereas ordinary social interactions are characterized by the joke, humor has always been inimical to sadism, just as light is to vampires. This humor that defuses outrage, no matter how justified, and dampens indignation, no matter how righteous, is just another name for surrender. Sadomasochism rejects the laugh that paralyzes social conscience. Within the charged space surrounding the master and his slave, true deeds are performed. One man does submit to another. One man does humiliate another. The same relief we experience in watching a Shakespeare play, the relief of participating in action devoid of irony and freighted with clear values, is the release offered to the sadist and masochist. The couple perform the mysteries of domination, of might, that obsess our culture. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri have said in the Anti-Oedipus, ‘Class struggle goes to the heart of desire.’ “
I’m not sure I would subscribe to such a penitential view of S&M today, nor do I believe now in such an un-nuanced Shakespeare. Moments of intellectual “breakthrough” are always difficult to recapture, and embarrassing to mention, since later they seem so obvious—or wrong. But I remember distinctly that when I wrote “Sado-Machismo” for New Times a young straight writer from the Village Voice and I were fired up by the notion that sex need not be Freudian or Darwinian but could be “artistic” or “expressive” or possibly “Marxist.” We were so thoroughly part of a puritanical society that it seemed daring to claim that sex might be as “useless” as art or that, alternately, it might be as dramatic as class conflict. We sat on the couch in Richard Sennett’s Washington Mews town house, egging each other on in this strange new direction.
In the early eighties the Mineshaft scene turned sour. Not only was the specter of AIDS dogging everyone’s steps, but there was also a ghastly ritualistic murder. Apparently a coke-snorting art dealer, Andrew Crispo, while sitting in his apartment, kept dialing the number of the public phone booth just outside the Mineshaft. A handsome Norwegian model answered and agreed to be picked up by Crispo’s passing car and to submit to a night of torture. The fun and games got out of hand, however, and the model, after hours of being tortured, was shot twice through the head by Crispo’s assistant and bodyguard, a renegade rich boy. The body was dumped in a smokehouse on the estate of the bodyguard’s parents’ estate on Long Island. When the victim was found much later, the leather mask had burned into his face but most of the body had become unrecognizable.
A new friend was Robert Mapplethorpe. I don’t think anyone before him in the art world had ever courted me. But Mapplethorpe, who was just becoming prominent, had spotted me as someone who could write about him. I don’t remember where we met—maybe on the street through a third person or at a party. He made it clear that he wasn’t interested in sex; no, he wanted me to write about him.
He certainly wasn’t afraid of being considered gay—on the contrary. He was interested in leather, S&M, scat, pain, blood—all those things that most gay men are careful to exclude in their list of desired activities when they write a personal ad (or now an online profile). He had had a famous affair with the punk singer Patti Smith, but now he was famously in love with the tall, much older, aristocratic Sam Wagstaff. Sam had launched Robert’s career by buying and exhibiting the greatest private