City Boy_ My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s - Edmund White [110]
Mapplethorpe was the high priest of virilization, that moment in the 1970s when gay men rejected other people’s definitions of homosexuality and embraced a new vision of themselves as “hypermasculine”—the famous “clone” look. Soldier, cop, construction worker, these were the looks celebrated and parodied by the disco band the Village People. But Mapplethorpe rejected the conformism and anodyne masculinity of the look and made it transgressive by pushing it toward pain, torture, sacrifice. His pictures weren’t erotic and were seldom arousing except to fetishists. Nor were they of unnamed subjects by an unnamed photographer, one of the usual prerequisites of pornography in the past. No, Mapplethorpe, like the good Catholic boy he was, believed in the devil. When he would have sex, he would whisper in his lover’s ear, “Do it for Satan.” Perhaps Pasolini, the Italian film director, was one ahead of him, since in his scandalous movie Salo he honored the two greatest sins or crimes in the gay world: satanism and pedophilia. Although Mapplethorpe was uninterested in children, he had his biggest scandal in England when he showed at the Tate a little girl exposing her crotch. That the child did this innocently, and that her mother had attended the shoot, meant nothing to the dirty-minded.
When I knew him, Mapplethorpe went nearly every night to the foot of Christopher Street across from the trucks and the Hudson River piers. There he was one of the few white men to be found in a gay black bar called Keller’s. Robert would sometimes wear his leathers, but they weren’t clunky Marlon Brando, The Wild One leathers with chains and buckles but rather elegant formfitting Dutch leathers seamed in blue or red. There he would stare with rapture and a single purpose at the person he most desired that evening.
I never understood Mapplethorpe’s sexuality. He would explain it to me and keep correcting with a little smile the wrong conclusion I’d jumped to. He’d say, “No, it has nothing to do with fantasy.” Or he’d say, “No, it’s not a matter of role-playing. Nothing could be realer than what I like. That’s why I like it—it’s real.”
He was soft-spoken and polite. He was completely unpretentious and talked freely but without too much interest about his poor Catholic family on Long Island. He’d lived with Patti Smith at the Chelsea Hotel, but he seldom talked about her. Maybe I didn’t ask enough questions, but, no, I think the reality of being young and on the make in the seventies in New York was so absorbing that people didn’t dwell much on the past. People who talk a lot about the past believe it was better, but for us the present was the golden age.
One day he called me and told me he was sending over an interesting new writer—Bruce Chatwin. We had an instant sexual response to each other, possibly because we were meeting through Mapplethorpe. Bruce with his bright, hard eyes and his odorless WASP body and flickering, ironic smile and his general derring-do instantly groped me while we were still standing just inside the door, and a minute later we’d shed our clothes and were still standing. We had sex in the most efficient way, we put our clothes back on, and we never repeated the experience with each other though we continued to see each other up until months before Bruce’s early death from AIDS. Bruce wrote a wonderful essay about Mapplethorpe, but so did Susan Sontag. Robert was good in finding the best writers to talk about his work, though he himself was anything but a reader.
Robert lived alone in a gloomy loft on Bond Street, not too far from my place on Lafayette. It was filled with dark Stickley furniture from the beginning of the century and big Arts and