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, education, old money, 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 early fall evening of 1975, and gave the slightest impression that he’d rather be elsewhere.
As the hostess was a longtime friend of my former lover 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 gay 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 particular connection with him. Frankly, his sartorial appearance indicated a preference for a kinkier kind of sexuality than interested me at the time.
A month or so later, I received a call at work from my longtime friend Ed Shostak, a sculptor represented by the Holly Solomon Gallery in Soho, where I served as assistant director. Among my functions was to scout new talent, though the gallery already represented nineteen artists, which gave it a broad artistic range. Ed recommended that I make an appointment to view some photographs he’d recently seen by a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe, and, while the name didn’t ring any bells for me at the time, I jotted down the information with every intention of following through. A few weeks slipped away without my calling the photographer, so Ed phoned again to remind me. I called Mapplethorpe immediately and expressed my interest in seeing his work, and, while neither of us acknowledged having met before, we set up an appointment to meet at his studio on January 5, 1976, at one o’clock.
The Holly Solomon Gallery had opened on West Broadway in the late summer of 1975 to a great deal of excitement, as it represented a large and diverse stable of artists. In turn, they represented a plethora of artistic genres, styles, and sensibilities, which gave many art writers and critics the impression that the gallery was unfocused. Nevertheless, Holly Solomon—along with her husband Horace, a well-known collector of Pop Art—believed strongly in her artists and worked hard to establish markets for them, despite the steep uphill climb the first two years always required.
Arriving at Mapplethorpe’s Bond Street building, I rang the bell and took the elevator to his fifth floor loft. Stepping into the dimly lit space, Robert met me wearing his typically tight jeans, denim work shirt, black leather vest, and lizard skin boots. Neither of us seemed to recognize the other or, at any rate, to acknowledge that we did, but he was shyly friendly, polite, and attentive all the same. His living quarters were located in the back of the space, with a pristine posing studio at the front, he told me. He also informed me that he did not do his own developing or printing, but was planning to have a darkroom built so that his hired printers could work on the premises under his exacting supervision. Technical matters interested him not at all, but the results had to meet his strict visual specifications.
He directed me to the living room, which was also dimly lit. Black-leather-upholstered, dark-oak Mission furniture was arranged simply, with the open bedroom defined and cordoned off by floor-to-ceiling mesh screening, as though a cage. Here and there, darkly patinated Victorian bronzes of fauns, satyrs, and satanic figures offset the staid geometry of the furniture and added to the broodingly elegant yet slightly macabre atmosphere.
Robert offered me coffee, then pointed to several spiral-bound portfolios for me to peruse on the coffee table. I began flipping through the images as he prepared the coffee and spoke economically from the nearby kitchen about his work. His language was as spare as the composition and lighting of the mostly Polaroid images I was paging through, images of flowers, still lifes, portraits, and a few landscapes. After two or three books, he slid two more toward me, saying with a slight grin on his elfin face that these were his “dirty pictures.” He sat sprawled in a Stickley armchair, watching intently for my reaction like a transgressive little boy as I browsed through the male nudes engaged in both subtle and overt sexual poses and activities. In the silence between us, the smoke from his Kool cigarette curled upward, undisturbed.
I wasn’t shocked, but neither was I certain if Robert offered these as a litmus test to establish or challenge my æsthetic boundaries or acceptance levels, or, more simply, as titillation. Although we had never discussed it, it was clear to me that we both knew the other was gay. My instinct was to regard these sexual images with the same criteria as the non-sexual, despite the minute hint of naughty glee that glinted in Robert’s eye. Granted, it was rare to find photographs of gay sexual imagery in anything but a porn magazine at that time. But these images were informed by the same cool, formalistic composure, elegance, and stylishness that imbued his non-sexual subjects, which created a frisson of freshness and excitement that harked back to the technical virtuosity and sophistication of George Platt Lynes, Herbert List, or Minor White, with a dash of 1950’s beefcake photographers such as Bob Mizer and Bruce Bellas.
I liked the work, and told Robert that I would recommend to Holly that she make an appointment to see for herself. Within a week or two, she and her husband Horace did just that. The day following their visit, she told me that their response was generally positive and that she’d commissioned Robert to take her portrait. She wasn’t keen on the “dirty pictures,” she told me, but thought his portrait work would make him a worthwhile addition to the gallery’s stable. After she saw the results of her portrait sitting, she offered Mapplethorpe a show for the following year in February.
Robert then began stopping by the gallery with some regularity, and since I manned the reception desk, I was usually the first to meet with him. He was always pleasant, well mannered, and interested in any news that pertained to sales or inquiries about his work. He’d then visit with Holly in her office. Any attention he gave me I regarded as strictly professional, until one afternoon, Holly mentioned she thought Robert was interested in me, and in more than a businesslike way. I didn’t give her comment much thought, as I’d not picked up on any overt flirtations, though I did find him attractive and quite smooth, with a boyish playfulness that was alluring.
At her insistence, I thought about his demeanor with me and realized that occasionally his gaze or smile lingered a bit longer than necessary. He had a charming friskiness about him, a devilishness that could be interpreted in several ways. Some men on the make speak with a sly double entendre; Robert looked with one. I knew he was involved with Sam Wagstaff in some way, and I had no intention of entering or disrupting an ongoing relationship. He started visiting more frequently, and since he often arrived near quitting time, his intentions toward me became clearer. We’d chat about the gallery artists, most of whom he said he didn’t care for. I learned more about his tastes and preferences in art and discerned that his knowledge came mostly from what he’d picked up along the way under the tutelage of Wagstaff. It also became clear that he fostered some racial bigotry and anti-Semitism, which made me uncomfortable, though I suspected he liked to push the limits of propriety mostly for the shock value. Even into his thirties, he was still a renegade little boy in many ways, a rebellious teenager who took delight in being contrary and pushing boundaries.
In late January, I agreed to join Robert for dinner after an opening at the gallery. After stopping by the Leo Castelli Gallery to see the new Jasper Johns exhibit, I made my way to Robert’s loft. Greeting me warmly and offering wine, he showed me his collection of vintage photographs that were about to be sent off and exhibited at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, Connecticut. We then caught a cab over to Bonnie’s in the West Village, a favorite restaurant of his at the time. Over dinner, we spoke of methods of publishing print editions and marketing strategies. As the evening progressed, I felt myself succumbing willingly to the subtle charisma and ardor he ladled out so teasingly. We walked back at a leisurely pace to the Bond Street loft, despite the seasonal cold.
While completely unintrigued by S&M and the leather culture of which I knew he was a part, I was interested in his sexual prowess and technique. These were the late 1970’s, after all, and as we entered his bedroom and got out of our clothes, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But he was a gentle and easy lover, profoundly responsive and passionate, completely open and sharing, and in fact followed my lead rather than attempting any coup. Afterward, as we lay relaxing in the afterglow, he nuzzled my ear softly, saying, “See, you didn’t get tied up.”
Just after he’d photographed Holly, and I had seen the resulting tripartite portrait, I told Robert that I hoped he would photograph me sometime. He now told me that since we’d been intimate, my photograph was guaranteed to be excellent, which I took to be a bit of arty flattery. But he was quite adamant that he knew people better after having had sex with them, in ways perhaps that others couldn’t decipher.
Over the next several months, we saw each other or spoke on the phone several times each week, though Robert’s fascination with sexual behaviors I found repugnant increasingly strained our intimacy. Less adventurous about sex than he, Robert grew bored with my unwillingness to indulge him, and I began to pull back from emotions I knew could never come to fruition. His appetite and capacity for drugs also alarmed me, so we eventually retreated to a friendship that was more reserved and professional, but safer and less emotionally taxing for me. I cared for Robert, but increasingly understood that he wasn’t interested in the kind of relationship I was looking for.
When we had first started to spend time together, several friends had warned me discreetly that Robert was only out to use me to get an exhibit, or to use me sexually and then just walk away; and while I may have been somewhat naïve, I did not then believe those were his motives. I missed his sexy playfulness, and the boyish charm he’d first presented. His accelerating interest in what I felt was self-destructive behavior saddened me, however. For a while his compulsion to explore the sexually bizarre continued with an academic fixation, but eventually he grew tired of that. His subsequent HIV-positive diagnosis in the mid-1980’s quelled this obsession.
In the weeks leading up to his February exhibit at Holly’s, we were all exhausted from discussing the merits of the “dirty pictures.” No amount of impassioned conversation could sway the Solomons from their determination not to exhibit them. There was no way they could see them as anything but pornography, and such images would not besmirch their gallery’s walls! Faced with her attraction to Robert’s work, the possibility of portrait commissions, and his theatrical approach to framing with expensive, exotic woods and luxurious fabric-covered mattes, Holly still could not perceive the “dirty pictures” as art. I argued early on that by mixing his several subjects in one exhibit—the sex pictures and nudes with the portraits and still lifes—the power of the sexual imagery would be diluted, while at the same time the non-sexual photographs would be charged up. Viewers could see that the same æsthetic sensibility informed all of Robert’s work, I argued, but Holly didn’t buy it. I found it uncharacteristic of her to avoid taking this risk.
So Robert showed only portraits in his first exhibit at the Holly Solomon Gallery and arranged with The Kitchen, a performance space also in Soho, to exhibit “The Erotic Pictures.” Neither exhibition yielded many sales. Portraits are a tough sell in any market, and photographs at the time were just beginning to find a viable audience of collectors. But as business ventures, the market was unresponsive to Mapplethorpe’s work. By having been forced by the Solomons to separate the genres, Robert could clearly demarcate two separate audiences, but, in the long run, I don’t think the Solomons did Robert or themselves any favors by excluding the erotic works. Business was business, after all.
In the mid-summer of 1977, I left the gallery and soon joined the Sidney Janis Gallery uptown. In November, during his “Flowers” exhibit at Holly’s, Robert was making plans to leave the gallery as well. Dissatisfied with Holly as a dealer, he and Sam had been seeking an uptown venue, and found one in the newly opened Robert Miller Gallery.
Robert and I were friendly to one another when we’d meet at parties, openings, or elsewhere. Occasionally, he was with Sam, who favored good conversation and remained very friendly. In fact, Sam was extremely helpful to me in 1980 when I curated my first museum exhibit, “In Photography: Color as Subject” at the School of Visual Arts. This was the first exhibit in New York to feature a work in color by Mapplethorpe.
At an opening of an exhibit of works by the legendary pornographer Tom of Finland, held at the Robert Samuel Gallery on lower Broadway, I ran into Robert with Tom, who spoke little English. After introducing me to Tom, the three of us managed to have a limited conversation and agreed to meet later that night at the Mineshaft, the most notorious of New York’s sex bars in the Meatpacking District. We chatted at the bar for a while; then each drifted off to do his thing. I didn’t see much of Robert after that, and finally left New York in late 1981.
Robert was known to be a regular at the Mineshaft. When I did run into him, it was usually there. The club had by then an international reputation, and while it often seemed that there were more casual onlookers than active participants, the establishment hadn’t gone lax on any of its strict rules of behavior or appearance. By then, the club’s sensibility had become the ultimate standard for gay sex bars everywhere, ingrained to this day in gay male mythology, and it permeated other clubs throughout the city. Those were the halcyon days of gay youth, before the catastrophe of AIDS. Robert Mapplethorpe had given that standard of urban gay sex life his photographic imprimatur, and then, with a bold and deliberate temerity, he foisted it onto the world. A part of that world never forgave him.
David B. Boyce, a freelance arts writer and curator, is curatorial consultant for the New Bedford Art Museum in New Bedford, Mass.
