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Palm Drive Publishing
Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera
Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera
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Keening his bicoastal lover Robert Mapplethorpe, Jack Fritscher based this personal memoir of sex, art, race, politics, drugs, and friendship on his detailed 1970s journals, and on his interviews with a dozen of Mapplethorpe’s intimate and famous friends such as Joel-Peter Witkin, George Dureau, Edward Lucie-Smith, and Holly Solomon. Fritscher has written a fast-paced impressionist book, suitable for our social-media times. His quick-messaging text is often provocative and wonderfully vexing because everyone seems to have fierce opinions about the controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
In 1977, the young Mapplethorpe, at the beginning of his career, flew to San Francisco seeking publication from Jack Fritscher, the influential editor in chief of the international <i>Drummer</i> magazine. Fritscher profiled Mapplethorpe and gave him his first magazine cover. The two became instant bi-coastal friends, colleagues, and lovers for three epic years during the first decade of gay liberation after Stonewall. Mapplethorpe, the photographer, told Fritscher, the writer, that he wanted to become a story told in beds around the world. As an eyewitness of Mapplethorpe’s secret life, personal character, and outrageous career, Fritscher immediately began journaling, writing, and publishing elements of what would become his faithful insider’s gay-verite memoir. He wrote his first impressions in 1978, eleven years before Robert died, seventeen years before biographer Patricia Morrisroe’s straight-laced <i>Mapplethorpe</i>, and thirty-two years before Patti Smith’s tender reminiscence, <i>Just Kids</I>.
As he lay dying in the late 1980s, Mapplethorpe kept next to his bed a copy of a story Fritscher wrote about him in 1979, telling visitors: “This story is about me.” When Robert died on March 9, 1989, Fritscher wrote a feature obituary for <i>Drummer</i> magazine which caught the eye of a critic at the <i>New York Times</i> at the same moment Jesse Helms denounced Robert, dead only one hundred days, on the floor of the United States Senate, starting the biggest art scandal of the twentieth century. That media fight over art and pornography so demonized Mapplethorpe that Fritscher set out to defend his friend. With right-wing politics demolishing the sweet, witty, and caring person Mapplethorpe had been to Fritscher, Fritscher reshaped his memoir from a 1970s love story with, according to Luc Sante at <i>The New Yorker</i>, a bit of “polemic” against the wider issue of homophobia that a majority of straight American critics, politicians, and religionists have always had against gay writers, artists, and photographers fearless in their presentations of race, sex, and gender.
Within months of Robert’s death, Fritscher added a chorus of insightful voices to his own by interviewing a select dozen or so of pertinent colleagues and prestigious friends of Mapplethorpe. By interviewing them early on in 1990, he recorded their true stories told honestly before angry myth, jealous legend, and righteous scandal adulterated almost everyone’s tales of Mapplethorpe. If this eulogy of a book has a central image, it is of a group of artists keening the death of a friend.
Besides Robert Opel, famous for streaking the 1974 Academy Awards and founding Fey-Way Studio, the first gay gallery in San Francisco, the lively voices talking in Q&A with Fritscher include Mapplethorpe’s secret New Orleans mentor, George Dureau; Manhattan gallery owner, Holly Solomon; British art critic, Edward Lucie-Smith; the 1920s-1930s pioneer photographer of African-American men, Miles Everett, whom Mapplethorpe collected; and Mapplethorpe’s peer, photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, whose exquisite work is more shocking than any Mapplethorpe frame.
With humor, authority, and brio, Fritscher is a wonderful stylist as a “politically incorrect” storyteller who dares put the Catholic Mapplethorpe into the page-turning context of the wild pagan world that was gay liberation before the speeding first-class party people, cruising on in the Titanic 1970s, crashed into the iceberg of AIDS. If you missed the 1970s party, or if you revel in nostalgia for it, curl up with this author of a good book.
In 1977, the young Mapplethorpe, at the beginning of his career, flew to San Francisco seeking publication from Jack Fritscher, the influential editor in chief of the international <i>Drummer</i> magazine. Fritscher profiled Mapplethorpe and gave him his first magazine cover. The two became instant bi-coastal friends, colleagues, and lovers for three epic years during the first decade of gay liberation after Stonewall. Mapplethorpe, the photographer, told Fritscher, the writer, that he wanted to become a story told in beds around the world. As an eyewitness of Mapplethorpe’s secret life, personal character, and outrageous career, Fritscher immediately began journaling, writing, and publishing elements of what would become his faithful insider’s gay-verite memoir. He wrote his first impressions in 1978, eleven years before Robert died, seventeen years before biographer Patricia Morrisroe’s straight-laced <i>Mapplethorpe</i>, and thirty-two years before Patti Smith’s tender reminiscence, <i>Just Kids</I>.
As he lay dying in the late 1980s, Mapplethorpe kept next to his bed a copy of a story Fritscher wrote about him in 1979, telling visitors: “This story is about me.” When Robert died on March 9, 1989, Fritscher wrote a feature obituary for <i>Drummer</i> magazine which caught the eye of a critic at the <i>New York Times</i> at the same moment Jesse Helms denounced Robert, dead only one hundred days, on the floor of the United States Senate, starting the biggest art scandal of the twentieth century. That media fight over art and pornography so demonized Mapplethorpe that Fritscher set out to defend his friend. With right-wing politics demolishing the sweet, witty, and caring person Mapplethorpe had been to Fritscher, Fritscher reshaped his memoir from a 1970s love story with, according to Luc Sante at <i>The New Yorker</i>, a bit of “polemic” against the wider issue of homophobia that a majority of straight American critics, politicians, and religionists have always had against gay writers, artists, and photographers fearless in their presentations of race, sex, and gender.
Within months of Robert’s death, Fritscher added a chorus of insightful voices to his own by interviewing a select dozen or so of pertinent colleagues and prestigious friends of Mapplethorpe. By interviewing them early on in 1990, he recorded their true stories told honestly before angry myth, jealous legend, and righteous scandal adulterated almost everyone’s tales of Mapplethorpe. If this eulogy of a book has a central image, it is of a group of artists keening the death of a friend.
Besides Robert Opel, famous for streaking the 1974 Academy Awards and founding Fey-Way Studio, the first gay gallery in San Francisco, the lively voices talking in Q&A with Fritscher include Mapplethorpe’s secret New Orleans mentor, George Dureau; Manhattan gallery owner, Holly Solomon; British art critic, Edward Lucie-Smith; the 1920s-1930s pioneer photographer of African-American men, Miles Everett, whom Mapplethorpe collected; and Mapplethorpe’s peer, photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, whose exquisite work is more shocking than any Mapplethorpe frame.
With humor, authority, and brio, Fritscher is a wonderful stylist as a “politically incorrect” storyteller who dares put the Catholic Mapplethorpe into the page-turning context of the wild pagan world that was gay liberation before the speeding first-class party people, cruising on in the Titanic 1970s, crashed into the iceberg of AIDS. If you missed the 1970s party, or if you revel in nostalgia for it, curl up with this author of a good book.
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